e's keeping company with it's his
business, but that outside of that he's got no say so. Understand?

"So you don't think I'll succeed as a writer, eh?" he went on. "You
think I'm no good?--that I've fallen down and am a disgrace to the
family?"

"I think it would be much better if you got a job," she said firmly, and
he saw she was sincere. "Hermann says--"

"Damn Hermann!" he broke out good-naturedly. "What I want to know is
when you're going to get married. Also, you find out from your Hermann
if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from me."

He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke
out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her betrothed,
all the members of his own class and the members of Ruth's class,
directing their narrow little lives by narrow little
formulas--herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives by
one another's opinions, failing of being individuals and of really living
life because of the childlike formulas by which they were enslaved. He
summoned them before him in apparitional procession: Bernard Higginbotham
arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt cheek by jowl with
Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he judged them and dismissed
them--judged them by the standards of intellect and morality he had
learned from the books. Vainly he asked: Where are the great souls, the
great men and women? He found them not among the careless, gross, and
stupid intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow room.
He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her swine.
When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself alone, a
late-comer entered, unexpected and unsummoned. Martin watched him and
saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted coat and the
swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had once been he.

"You were like all the rest, young fellow," Martin sneered. "Your
morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did not
think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready
made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock of your
gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and ruled
the gang, not because you liked to,--you know you really despised it,--but
because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder. You licked Cheese-
Face because you wouldn't give in, and you wouldn't