y
or green, the heavens blue or gray, the waters tawny or blue. No
loveliness of land or flood could deflect his undivided interest in
whatever human converse he happened to be nearest as he drifted about
decks in a listless unrest that kept him singled out at every pause and
turn. His very fair intelligence was so indolently unaspiring, so
intolerant of harness, as we may say, and so contentedly attuned to the
general mind, mind of the multitude, that the idlest utterance falling
on his ear from any merest unit of the common crowd was more to him than
all the depths or heights of truth, order, or beauty that learning,
training, or the least bit of consecutive reasoning could reveal.
Earlier he had not lacked books or tutelage, but no one ever had been
able to teach him what they were for. This was Basile Hayle, the
overdressed young brother of the twins. Now that his seventeen years had
ripened in him the conviction that he was entitled, as the phrase is,
"to all the rights of a man and all the privileges of a boy," he seemed
yet to have acquired no sense of value for any fact or thought beyond
the pointblank range of the five senses. He could not have read ten
pages of a serious book and would have blushed to be found trying to do
it.

He was not greatly to blame. That way of life was much the fashion all
about him, and he was by every impulse fashionable. Moreover, as he
measured success by the crowd's measure, it was the way of life oftenest
successful, the way of his father. He did not see the difference between
the father's toiling up that way and his idling down it. So, at any
rate, agreed the indulgent Gilmores, reading him quite through in a few
glances, while all about the boat those who thought they knew best
pronounced him more like Gideon Hayle in his regard for "folks just as
folks" than were either the twins or the sister, from all three of whom
his impulses kept him amiably aloof.

Of the three brothers certainly he had soon become the most widely
acceptable among not only the young people of the passenger guards but
also the male commonalty of the boiler deck. In a state of society which
he, as "a type," reflected they saw themselves; saw their own spiritual
image; their unqualified straightforwardness, their transparent
simplicity of mind and heart, their fearlessness, their complacent
rusticity, their childish notions of the uses of wealth, their personal
modesty and communal vanity, their happy obl