the man who has never known
defeat. To have been reared in luxury as he had been, to have seen
only the pleasant side of society, which is so persistent and so
deluding where money is concerned, to have been in the run of big
affairs not because one has created them, but because one is a part of
them and because they are one's birthright, like the air one breathes,
could not help but create one of those illusions of solidarity which
is apt to befog the clearest brain. It is so hard for us to know what
we have not seen. It is so difficult for us to feel what we have not
experienced. Like this world of ours, which seems so solid and
persistent solely because we have no knowledge of the power which
creates it, Lester's world seemed solid and persistent and real enough
to him. It was only when the storms set in and the winds of adversity
blew and he found himself facing the armed forces of convention that
he realized he might be mistaken as to the value of his personality,
that his private desires and opinions were as nothing in the face of a
public conviction; that he was wrong. The race spirit, or social
avatar, the "Zeitgeist" as the Germans term it, manifested itself as
something having a system in charge, and the organization of society
began to show itself to him as something based on possibly a
spiritual, or, at least, superhuman counterpart. He could not fly in
the face of it. He could not deliberately ignore its mandates. The
people of his time believed that some particular form of social
arrangement was necessary, and unless he complied with that he could,
as he saw, readily become a social outcast. His own father and mother
had turned on him--his brother and sisters, society, his friends.
Dear heaven, what a to-do this action of his had created! Why, even
the fates seemed adverse. His real estate venture was one of the most
fortuitously unlucky things he had ever heard of. Why? Were the gods
battling on the side of a to him unimportant social arrangement?
Apparently. Anyhow, he had been compelled to quit, and here he was,
vigorous, determined, somewhat battered by the experience, but still
forceful and worth while.

And it was a part of the penalty that he had become measurably
soured by what had occurred. He was feeling that he had been compelled
to do the first ugly, brutal thing of his life. Jennie deserved better
of him. It was a shame to forsake her after all the devotion she had
manifested. Truly she had