e continued, "escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no
social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous
book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did
and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't
bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers,
scientists, statesmen who aren't just popular grab-bags for a half-dozen
women and children."

"He's the natural radical?"

"Yes," said Amory. "He may vary from the disillusioned critic like old
Thornton Hancock, all the way to Trotsky. Now this spiritually unmarried
man hasn't direct power, for unfortunately the spiritually married man,
as a by-product of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper,
the popular magazine, the influential weekly--so that Mrs. Newspaper,
Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil
people across the street or those cement people 'round the corner."

"Why not?"

"It makes wealthy men the keepers of the world's intellectual conscience
and, of course, a man who has money under one set of social institutions
quite naturally can't risk his family's happiness by letting the clamor
for another appear in his newspaper."

"But it appears," said the big man.

"Where?--in the discredited mediums. Rotten cheap-papered weeklies."

"All right--go on."

"Well, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of which
the family is the first, there are these two sorts of brains. One sort
takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and
its strength for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually
unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or
counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that's
complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life. That is his
struggle. He is a part of progress--the spiritually married man is not."

The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his huge
palm. The little man took one, Amory shook his head and reached for a
cigarette.

"Go on talking," said the big man. "I've been wanting to hear one of you
fellows."

*****

GOING FASTER

"Modern life," began Amory again, "changes no longer century by century,
but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before--populations
doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations,
economic interdependence, racial questions, and