at all well-groomed persons above the working class were
persons with power of intellect and vigor of beauty. Culture and collars
had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that
college educations and mastery were the same things.

Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth
with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would shine
anywhere. As it was clear to him that he had been handicapped by his
early environment, so now he perceived that she was similarly
handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand. The books on her
father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the piano--all
was just so much meretricious display. To real literature, real
painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead. And bigger
than such things was life, of which they were densely, hopelessly
ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of
conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind
interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while
their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older--the same that moved the
first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty
Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to
build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his
own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce
evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave
his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that
the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank
cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known was
on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore,
neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of them was lacking
the something more which he found in himself and in the books. The
Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce, and he
was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender,
he knew himself the superior of those he met at the Morses'; and, when
his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a
lord of life, quivering with a sense of