place
was a tomb to him.

As he sat in the little back parlour of The Black Bass, eating his
frugal breakfast of eggs and bread and milk, the meaning of it all
slowly dawned upon him. Through his intellect he had known something of
humanity, but he had never known men. He had thought of men in the mass,
and despised them because of their multitudinous duplication, and their
typical weaknesses; but he had never known one man or one woman from the
subtler, surer divination of the heart. His intellect had made servants
and lures of his emotions and his heart, for even his every case in
court had been won by easy and selfish command of all those feelings in
mankind which make possible personal understanding.

In this little back parlour it came to him with sudden force how, long
ago, he had cut himself off from any claim upon his fellows--not only by
his conduct, but by his merciless inhuman intelligence working upon the
merciful human life about him. He never remembered to have had any real
feeling till on that day with Kathleen--the day he died. The bitter
complaint of a woman he had wronged cruelly, by having married her, had
wrung from him his own first wail of life, in the one cry "Kathleen!"

As he sat eating his simple meal his pulses were beating painfully.
Every nerve in his body seemed to pluck at the angry flesh. There
flashed across his mind in sympathetic sensation a picture. It was the
axe-factory on the river, before which he used to stand as a boy, and
watch the men naked to the waist, with huge hairy arms and streaming
faces, toiling in the red glare, the trip-hammers endlessly pounding
upon the glowing metal. In old days it had suggested pictures of gods
and demi-gods toiling in the workshops of the primeval world. So
the whole machinery of being seemed to be toiling in the light of an
awakened conscience, to the making of a man. It seemed to him that all
his life was being crowded into these hours. His past was here--its
posing, its folly, its pitiful uselessness, and its shame. Kathleen and
Billy were here, with all the problems that involved them. Rosalie was
here, with the great, the last problem.

"Nothing matters but that--but Rosalie," he said to himself as he turned
to look out of the window at the wrangling dogs gnawing bones. "Here she
is in the midst of all I once knew, and I know that I am no more a part
of it than she is. She and Kathleen may have met face to face in
these streets--who ca