ions of road and jail, when I saw myself in the glass. I stood
transfixed. He had not meant to be ironic. The transformation was
startling....

"If you would only keep yourself tidy all the time that way!... it's
easy."

"Not for me ... everything material that I touch seems to fall apart....
I lose my shirts inexplicably ... my socks ... holes appear overnight in
my clothes. Books are the only things I can keep. I am always cluttered
up with them."

"Appearances mean everything ... then, if you have the rest, the goods
to deliver, there is no place a man might not go nor attain."

I looked the small town reporter over in surprise. I studied him closely
for the first time. He belonged to the world, not to Osageville ... the
world of fashion, of smartness ... a world I despised. My world and his
would always be like separate planets. He would consort with people for
the mere pleasure of social life with them. The one thing I did not like
about him was his small mouth ... but then I did not like my own mouth
... it was large, sensual, loose and cruel.

And his walk ... it was almost dainty mincing. But then my walk was a
loose, bent-kneed method of progression....

* * * * *

Miss Martin, the celebrated exposer of corrupt millionaires and captains
of industry, was dark and tall. She had been good-looking in girlhood.
She had fine eyes in a devastated face.

I found myself petted, mothered by her. As soon as she saw me she
removed a thread that hung to my coatsleeve.

At supper I was told of a new project. A group of writers, especially of
writers who were in revolt against big business and the corruption of
the trusts, were about to effect a combination and start what was to be
called the _National Magazine_; for it was to be no less than that, a
magazine embracing all America, to serve as a re-invigorant and
re-corroborant for new national ideals ... really only a tilting against
the evils of big combinations, in favour of the earlier and more
impossible ideals of small business units--the ideal of a bourgeois
commercial honesty and individual effort that could no more be
re-established than could the big shoe factory be broken up and returned
to the shanty of the village shoemaker.... Bryan's dream ... the last
effort of the middle classes to escape their surely destined
strangulation ... which gave birth to the abortive progressive party.

I was assured by Miss Martin and Mack