or the man. Had he ever felt it?

Axel Hilmer had long ceased to be a living personality to Fred
Starratt. Instead, he had taken on almost the significance of a
strange divinity ... an eternal questioner. At their very first
meeting he had started the ferment in Fred Starratt's soul with the
directness of his interrogations. He was not a man who declared his
own faiths ... he merely asked you to prove yours. The questions he
had asked Fred Starratt on that first night had been insignificant in
themselves. Why was it ridiculous for a butcher to want an eight-hour
day? Why should one have the firm's interest at heart? And yet the
sparks from such verbal flint stones had kindled a revolt that had
wrecked Fred Starratt's complacence.

One's sight becomes strengthened to destructive ideas by gradual
perception. And ideas of any kind are destructive flashed on
consciousness unawares. Fred had thought at first that Hilmer had but
opened his eyes to things standing in his range of vision, when, as a
matter of fact, Hilmer had merely loaned him his spectacles.
Everything he had seen from that first moment had been through
Hilmer's medium. A wise man would have proceeded slowly, building
himself up for the struggle. But Fred Starratt had had all the wistful
enthusiasm of a fool seeking to achieve power overnight. Yes, only a
fool could have been ashamed of his heritage. And when Hilmer had
placed him calmly in the ranks of the middle class the wine of content
had turned suddenly sour. A year ago his efforts were being directed
at escape from so contemptuous a characterization; to-night he was
content to acknowledge the impeachment and find a pride in the
circumstance. And, as he sat there shivering in the gloom of Storch's
cracked lamp, he had a vision of this scorned company to which he
unquestionably belonged, sterile and barren in the glare of accepted
standards, broken gradually by the plowshare of disillusionment and
harrowed to great potentialities by a deeper sense of their faiths and
needs. Yes, he had a conviction that what could take place in one soul
could take place in the soul of the mass ... he had not changed his
standards so much as he had proved them. The shape and color and
perfume of love and loyalty and faith had not been altered for him,
but he could discover their blossoming among the shadowy places.

At a black hour, before the first greenish glow was quickening the
east, he tiptoed and stood gazing down