a young and sturdy man, cannot work like a horse for months on end,
eating his meals anyhow and sleeping when he can, without losing
temporarily the zest for careless fun. For another thing, he found
himself looking at these immaculate young people as any hard-driven
worker must perforce look upon drones.

They were sons and daughters of the well-to-do, divorced from all
uncouthness, with pretty manners and good clothes. They seemed serene in
the assurance--MacRae got this impression for the first time in his
social contact with them--that wearing good clothes, behaving well,
giving themselves whole-heartedly to having a good time, was the most
important and satisfying thing in the world. They moved in an atmosphere
of considering these things their due, a birthright, their natural and
proper condition of well-being.

And MacRae found himself wondering what they gave or ever expected to
give in return for this pleasant security of mind and body. Some one had
to pay for it, the silks and georgettes and white flannels, furs and
strings of pearls and gold trinkets, the good food, the motor cars, and
the fun.

He knew a little about every one he met that evening, for in Vancouver
as in any other community which has developed a social life beyond the
purely primitive stages of association, people gravitate into sets and
cliques. They lived in good homes, they had servants, they week-ended
here and there. Of the dozen or more young men and women present, only
himself and Stubby Abbott made any pretense at work.

Yet somebody paid for all they had and did. Men in offices, in shops, in
fishing boats and mines and logging camps worked and sweated to pay for
all this well-being in which they could have no part. MacRae even
suspected that a great many men had died across the sea that this sort
of thing should remain the inviolate privilege of just such people as
these. It was not an inspiring conclusion.

He smiled to himself. How they would stare if he should voice these
stray thoughts in plain English. They would cry out that he was a
Bolshevik. Absolutely! He wondered why he should think such things. He
wasn't disgruntled. He wanted a great many things which these young
people of his own age had gotten from fairy godmothers,--in the shape of
pioneer parents who had skimmed the cream off the resources of a
developing frontier and handed it on to their children, and who
themselves so frequently kept in the background, a litt