rstood. This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could live in
any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought wilful and most
obstinate because she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole,
which was the only one she knew. She could not follow the flights of his
mind, and when his brain got beyond her, she deemed him erratic. Nobody
else's brain ever got beyond her. She could always follow her father and
mother, her brothers and Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow
Martin, she believed the fault lay with him. It was the old tragedy of
insularity trying to serve as mentor to the universal.

"You worship at the shrine of the established," he told her once, in a
discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater. "I grant that as
authorities to quote they are most excellent--the two foremost literary
critics in the United States. Every school teacher in the land looks up
to Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism. Yet I read his stuff,
and it seems to me the perfection of the felicitous expression of the
inane. Why, he is no more than a ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett
Burgess. And Praps is no better. His 'Hemlock Mosses,' for instance is
beautifully written. Not a comma is out of place; and the tone--ah!--is
lofty, so lofty. He is the best-paid critic in the United States.
Though, Heaven forbid! he's not a critic at all. They do criticism
better in England.

"But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it so
beautifully and morally and contentedly. Their reviews remind me of a
British Sunday. They are the popular mouthpieces. They back up your
professors of English, and your professors of English back them up. And
there isn't an original idea in any of their skulls. They know only the
established,--in fact, they are the established. They are weak minded,
and the established impresses itself upon them as easily as the name of
the brewery is impressed on a beer bottle. And their function is to
catch all the young fellows attending the university, to drive out of
their minds any glimmering originality that may chance to be there, and
to put upon them the stamp of the established."

"I think I am nearer the truth," she replied, "when I stand by the
established, than you are, raging around like an iconoclastic South Sea
Islander."

"It was the missionary who did the image breaking," he laughed. "And
unfortunately, all the missionaries are off among the h