is elbow upon it,
staring down at the floor. A considerable interval passed, broken only
by the ticking of the clock before he said:--

"You may be an authority on editorial writing--even on manhood--life.
But I can hardly recognize you in that capacity as regards sociology."

Sharlee made no reply. She had no idea that the young man's dismissal
from the _Post_ had been a crucifixion to him, an unendurable infamy
upon his virginal pride of intellect. She had no conception of his
powers of self-control, which happened to be far greater than her own,
and she would have given worlds to know what he was thinking at that
moment. For her part she was thinking of him, intensely, and in a
personal way. Manners he had none, but where did he get his manner? Who
had taught him to bow in that way? He had mentioned insults: where had
he heard of insults, this stray who had raised himself in the house of a
drunken policeman?

"Well," said Queed, with the utmost calmness, "you might tell me, in a
word, why you think I am a failure as a sociologist."

"You are a failure as a sociologist," said Sharlee, immediately, "for
the same reason as both your other failures: you are wholly out of
relation with real life. Sociology is the science of human society. You
know absolutely nothing about human society, except what other men have
found out and written down in text-books. You say that you are an
evolutionary sociologist. Yet a wonderful demonstration in social
evolution is going on all around you, and _you don't even know it_. You
are standing here directly between two civilizations. On the one side
there are Colonel Cowles and my old grandmother--mother of your
landlady, plucky dear! On the other there are our splendid young men,
men who, with traditions of leisure and cultured idleness in their
blood, have pitched in with their hands and heads to make this State
_hum_, and will soon be meeting and beating your Northern young men at
every turn. On one side there is the old slaveholding aristocracy; on
the other the finest Democracy in the world; and here and now human
society is evolving from one thing to the other. A real sociologist
would be absorbed in watching this marvelous process: social evolution
actually surprised in her workshop. But you--I doubt if you even knew it
was going on. A tremendous social drama is being acted out under your
very window and you yawn and _pull down the blind_."

There was a brief silence. In the co