and consistently urged him to get a
job, to go to work--good God!--as if he hadn't been working, robbing
sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.

So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate
regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was
becoming an obsession. Work performed. The phrase haunted his brain. He
sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over
Higginbotham's Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain himself
from shouting out:-

"It was work performed! And now you feed me, when then you let me
starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn't get a
job. And the work was already done, all done. And now, when I speak,
you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay
respectful attention to whatever I choose to say. I tell you your party
is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you
hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say. And why?
Because I'm famous; because I've a lot of money. Not because I'm Martin
Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool. I could tell you
the moon is made of green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion,
at least you would not repudiate it, because I've got dollars, mountains
of them. And it was all done long ago; it was work performed, I tell
you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your feet."

But Martin did not shout out. The thought gnawed in his brain, an
unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant. As
he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking.
He was a success himself, and proud of it. He was self-made. No one had
helped him. He owed no man. He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and
bringing up a large family. And there was Higginbotham's Cash Store,
that monument of his own industry and ability. He loved Higginbotham's
Cash Store as some men loved their wives. He opened up his heart to
Martin, showed with what keenness and with what enormous planning he had
made the store. And he had plans for it, ambitious plans. The
neighborhood was growing up fast. The store was really too small. If he
had more room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving and
money-saving improvements. And he would do it yet. He was straining
every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and put up
another two-story frame bu