y picked out the part of it that
compliments you. This fellow seems to have been struck by Krebs, says
he's a coming man, that he's making original contributions to the
people's cause. Quite a tribute. You ought to read it."

Dickinson, who had finished his lunch, got up and left the table after
lighting his cigar. Ralph's look followed him amusedly.

"I'm afraid it's time to cash in and be good," he observed.

"We'll get that fellow Krebs yet," said Grierson, wrathfully. Miller
Gorse alone made no remarks, but in spite of his silence he emanated an
animosity against reform and reformers that seemed to charge the very
atmosphere, and would have repressed any man but Ralph....

I sat in my room at the Club that night and reread the article, and if
its author could have looked into my soul and observed the emotions he
had set up, he would, no doubt, have experienced a grim satisfaction. For
I, too, had come in for a share of the comment. Portions of the matter
referring to me stuck in my brain like tar, such as the reference to my
father, to the honoured traditions of the Parets and the Brecks which I
had deliberately repudiated. I had less excuse than many others. The part
I had played in various reprehensible transactions such as the Riverside
Franchise and the dummy telephone company affair was dwelt upon, and I
was dismissed with the laconic comment that I was a graduate of
Harvard....

My associates and myself were referred to collectively as a "gang," with
the name of our city prefixed; we were linked up with and compared to the
gangs of other cities--the terminology used to describe us being that of
the police reporter. We "operated," like burglars; we "looted": only, it
was intimated in one place, "second-story men" were angels compared to
us, who had never seen the inside of a penitentiary. Here we were, all
arraigned before the bar of public opinion, the relentless Dickinson, the
surfeited Scherer, the rapacious Grierson, the salacious Tallant. I have
forgotten what Miller Gorse was called; nothing so classic as a Minotaur;
Judd Jason was a hairy spider who spread his net and lurked in darkness
for his victims. Every adjective was called upon to do its duty.... Even
Theodore Watling did not escape, but it was intimated that he would be
dealt with in another connection in a future number.

The article had a crude and terrifying power, and the pain it aroused,
following almost immediately upon the suffering c