none too
good now for it."

Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.

"I'll bet he's got dyspepsia right now!" Martin challenged.

"Yes, he has," she confessed; "but--"

"An' I bet," Martin dashed on, "that he's solemn an' serious as an old
owl, an' doesn't care a rap for a good time, for all his thirty thousand
a year. An' I'll bet he's not particularly joyful at seein' others have
a good time. Ain't I right?"

She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:-

"But he is not that type of man. By nature he is sober and serious. He
always was that."

"You can bet he was," Martin proclaimed. "Three dollars a week, an' four
dollars a week, an' a young boy cookin' for himself on an oil-burner an'
layin' up money, workin' all day an' studyin' all night, just workin' an'
never playin', never havin' a good time, an' never learnin' how to have a
good time--of course his thirty thousand came along too late."

His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner sight all the
thousands of details of the boy's existence and of his narrow spiritual
development into a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year man. With the swiftness
and wide-reaching of multitudinous thought Charles Butler's whole life
was telescoped upon his vision.

"Do you know," he added, "I feel sorry for Mr. Butler. He was too young
to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of thirty
thousand a year that's clean wasted upon him. Why, thirty thousand, lump
sum, wouldn't buy for him right now what ten cents he was layin' up would
have bought him, when he was a kid, in the way of candy an' peanuts or a
seat in nigger heaven."

It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth. Not
only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but she
always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or modify
her own convictions. Had she been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she
might have been changed by them; but she was twenty-four, conservative by
nature and upbringing, and already crystallized into the cranny of life
where she had been born and formed. It was true, his bizarre judgments
troubled her in the moments they were uttered, but she ascribed them to
his novelty of type and strangeness of living, and they were soon
forgotten. Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength of
their utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that
accompanied them, always thr