ds to O'Day on the following
morning related to his meeting with Father Cruse. "Ye'll not find a
better man anywhere," she had said to him, "and there ain't a trouble he
can't cure."

Felix had smiled at her enthusiasm for her idol and comforted her by
saying that it had given him distinct pleasure to meet him, adding: "A
big man with a big soul, that priest of yours, Mistress Kitty. I begin
to see now why you and your husband lead such human lives. Yes--a fine
man."

But no closer intimacy ensued, nor did he pursue the acquaintance--not
even on the following Sunday, when Kitty urged him, almost to
importunity, to go and hear the Father say mass. He was not ready
as yet, he said to himself, for friendships among men of his own
intellectual caliber. In the future he might decide otherwise. For the
present, at least, he meant to find whatever peace and comfort he could
among the simple people immediately around him--meagrely educated,
often strangely narrow-minded, but possessing qualities which every day
aroused in him a profounder admiration.

With the quick discernment of the man of the world--one to whom many
climes and many people were familiar--he had begun to discover for
himself that this great middle class was really the backbone of the
whole civil structure about him, its self-restraint, sanity, and
cleanliness marking the normal in the tide-gauge of the city's
activities; the hysteria of the rich and the despair of the poor being
the two extremes.

Here, as he repeatedly observed, were men absorbed in their several
humble occupations, proud of their successes, helpful of those who fell
by the wayside, good citizens and good friends, honest in their business
relations, each one going about his appointed task and leaving the other
fellow unmolested in his. Here, too, were women, good mothers to their
children and good wives to their husbands, untiring helpmates, regarding
their responsibilities as mutual, and untroubled as yet by thoughts of
their own individual identities or what their respective husbands owed
to them.

This was why, instead of renewing his acquaintance with Father Cruse,
he preferred to halt for a few minutes' talk with some one of Kitty's
neighbors--it might be the liveryman next door who had been forty years
on the Avenue, or one of the shopkeepers near by, most of whom were
welcome to Kitty's sitting-room and kitchen, and all of whom had shared
her coffee. Or it might be that he would