ossessed. They knew what was never printed in the
newspapers--the wires and strings and the hidden hands that made the
puppets dance. To Martin's surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the
conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encountered in the
few women he had met. They talked together on Swinburne and Rossetti,
after which she led him beyond his depth into the by-paths of French
literature. His revenge came when she defended Maeterlinck and he
brought into action the carefully-thought-out thesis of "The Shame of the
Sun."

Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with tobacco
smoke, when Brissenden waved the red flag.

"Here's fresh meat for your axe, Kreis," he said; "a rose-white youth
with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer. Make a Haeckelite of
him--if you can."

Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic thing,
while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet, girlish
smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.

Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered, until
he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle. Martin listened and
fain would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible that this should be,
much less in the labor ghetto south of Market. The books were alive in
these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual
stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men.
What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word,
written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living
philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its
very features worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in,
and all followed the discussion with cigarettes going out in their hands
and with alert, intent faces.

Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now received
at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical plausibility of it,
that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and
Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn,
sneered back at them as metaphysicians. Phenomenon and noumenon were
bandied back and forth. They charged him with attempting to explain
consciousness by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery, with
reasoning from words to theory instead of from facts to theory. At this
they were aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode