through a few stereotyped quizzes to assure itself that he was neither
insane nor criminal, and finally moved him on to a less trying but an
equally vacuous existence. He used to wonder just what tortures the
others had endured during that week of probation in Ward 1, which, in
nearly every case, so far as he could learn, included the experience
of the bull pen. For, after all, these other men were physically
shaken from excess--weak, spent, tremulous. He had been through mental
tortures, but, at least, his body and soul had had some fitness for
the strain upon him. How close did the winds of madness come to
snapping clean these empty reeds ... how many were broken utterly? He
asked Monet.

"Lots of them go under," Felix Monet had returned. "I think I came
very near it myself... I remember that first night I spent alone in
Ward One... I'd been three weeks without a drop of anything to drink.
Cut off, suddenly, like that!" He made a swift gesture. "And all at
once I found myself in a madhouse. I actually knocked my head against
the wall that night... And, in the morning, came the bull pen... They
knew I wasn't insane. My record--everything--proved that! ... When I
protested, their excuse was that everyone was equal here ... there
were no favorites. ... More lies in the name of equality! The thing
doesn't exist--it never has existed. Nothing is equal, and trying to
make it so produces hell. They're always trying to level ... level.
They want to strip you of everything but your flock mind. Ah yes,
timid sheep make easy herding!"

For the first time Fred Starratt saw Monet quivering with unleashed
conviction, and he glimpsed the hidden turbulence of spirit which
churned under the placid surface.

"After a while," Monet went on, "when I got almost to the snapping
point, they sent me to Ward Six. You know how it is--like a clear,
cold plunge ... it wakes you up... There's a method in it all. They
know that after a week in hell you find even purgatory desirable."

"And yet, once you got away, you traveled the same road that had
brought you here in the first place... Was the game worth the candle?"

"It was an escape while it lasted, even though it did lead me to
prison again... But isn't that where escape always leads? The world is
a good deal like Fairview--a rule-ridden institution on a larger
scale... We escape for a time in our work, in our play, in our loves,
but the tether's pretty short. ... And finally, one day,