and long hours and all the fellows hurt or killed on the
docks and in the stoke holes? Does he give you any feeling at all of
this harbor as a city of four million people, most of 'em getting a raw
deal and getting mad about it? That's more important to you and me than
all the efficiency gods on earth. You've got to decide which side you're
on. And that's what's got me talking now. I see so plain which way
you're letting yourself be pulled. I've seen so many pulled the same
way. It's so pleasant up there at the top, there's so much money and
brains up there and refinement--such women to get married to, such homes
to settle down in. Sometimes I wish every promising radical kid in the
country could get himself into some scandal that would cut him off for
life from any chance of being received by this damned respectable upper
class!"

He stopped for a moment, and then with a gruff intensity:

"We need you, Bill," he ended. "We need you bad. We don't want you to
marry a girl at the top. We don't want you anchored up there for life."

We were standing still now, and I was looking out on the river. Through
the grip of his hand on my arm I could feel his body taut and quivering,
his whole spirit hot with revolt. The same old Joe, but tenser now,
strained almost to the breaking point. But I myself was different. In
college he had appealed to me because there I was groping and had found
nothing. But now I had found something sure. And so, though to my own
surprise a deep emotional part of me rose up in sudden response to Joe
and made me feel guilty to hold back, it was only for a moment, and then
my mind told me he was wrong. Poor old J. K. What a black distorted view
he had--grown out of a distorted life of traveling continually from one
center of trouble to another. How could he be any judge of life?

"Look here, Joe," I said. "I'm a kid, as you say, and some day I may see
your side of this. But I don't now, I can't--for since I left Paris I've
been through enough to make me feel what a job living is, I mean really
living and growing. And I know what a difference Dillon has made. He has
been to my life what he is to this harbor. And I'm not old enough nor
strong enough to throw over a man as big as that and as honest and clean
in his thinking, and throw myself in with your millions of people, who
seem to me either mighty poor thinkers or fellows who don't think at
all. They're not in my line. I believe in men who can think c