eathen, so there
are none left at home to break those old images, Mr. Vanderwater and Mr.
Praps."

"And the college professors, as well," she added.

He shook his head emphatically. "No; the science professors should live.
They're really great. But it would be a good deed to break the heads of
nine-tenths of the English professors--little, microscopic-minded
parrots!"

Which was rather severe on the professors, but which to Ruth was
blasphemy. She could not help but measure the professors, neat,
scholarly, in fitting clothes, speaking in well-modulated voices,
breathing of culture and refinement, with this almost indescribable young
fellow whom somehow she loved, whose clothes never would fit him, whose
heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew excited when he talked,
substituting abuse for calm statement and passionate utterance for cool
self-possession. They at least earned good salaries and were--yes, she
compelled herself to face it--were gentlemen; while he could not earn a
penny, and he was not as they.

She did not weigh Martin's words nor judge his argument by them. Her
conclusion that his argument was wrong was reached--unconsciously, it is
true--by a comparison of externals. They, the professors, were right in
their literary judgments because they were successes. Martin's literary
judgments were wrong because he could not sell his wares. To use his own
phrase, they made good, and he did not make good. And besides, it did
not seem reasonable that he should be right--he who had stood, so short a
time before, in that same living room, blushing and awkward,
acknowledging his introduction, looking fearfully about him at the bric-a-
brac his swinging shoulders threatened to break, asking how long since
Swinburne died, and boastfully announcing that he had read "Excelsior"
and the "Psalm of Life."

Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she worshipped the
established. Martin followed the processes of her thoughts, but forbore
to go farther. He did not love her for what she thought of Praps and
Vanderwater and English professors, and he was coming to realize, with
increasing conviction, that he possessed brain-areas and stretches of
knowledge which she could never comprehend nor know existed.

In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera not
only unreasonable but wilfully perverse.

"How did you like it?" she asked him one night, on the way home from the
opera.

I