in blindly. They'll blame me, as though it was my fault.
I didn't want him to go there. I wanted him to take a hand here, to run
the place by himself in good time. It was his mother who sent him away
first." He went on like that, justifying himself more positively as
excuse after excuse suggested itself.

Not until he had convinced himself that he was in no way responsible,
did he allow his heart to beat a little for this boy of his. "Poor
Bill," he thought on, "it has been a tough game for him. Lost in the
shuffle. Born into something he didn't like and trying to escape, only
to get caught. What did he expect out of life, anyway? Why didn't
he learn that it's only a lot of senseless pain? Every moment of it
pain--from coming into the world to going out. Oh, Bill, why didn't you
learn what I know? You had brains, boy, but it would have been better
if you had never used them. I've brains, too, but I've always managed
to keep them tied down--buckled to the farm, to investments, and
work--thinking about things that make us forget life. It's all dust and
dust, with rain once in a while, only the rain steams off and it's dust
again."

Martin began to review the course of his own past, and smiled bitterly.
Others were able to live the same kind of an existence, but, unlike
himself, took it as a preparation for another day, another existence
which, it seemed to him, was measured and cut to order by professionals
who understood how to fix up the meaning of life so that it would
soothe and satisfy. He thought how much better it was to be a dumb,
unquestioning beast, or a human being conscious of his soul, than to be
as he was--alone, a materialist, who saw the meaninglessness of
matter and whose mind, in some manner which he did not understand, had
developed a slant that made him doubt what others accepted so easily as
facts. Martin knew he was bound to things of substance but he followed
the lure of property and accumulation as he might have followed some
other game had he learned it, knowing all along that it was a delusion
and at the same time acknowledging that for him there was nothing else
as sufficing.

How simple, if Bill's future could be a settled thing in his mind as
it was to the boy's mother. Or his own future! If only he could
believe--then how different it would be for him. He could go on placidly
and die with a smile. But he could not believe. His atheism was both
mental and instinctive. It was something he c