fifteen years.

The worst moment in the life of a man who has always proudly regarded
himself as above any need whatever from his fellow men is when he
discovers all in a flash, that the timid animal he spurned as it fawned
has him upon his back, has its teeth and claws at his helpless throat.

For four months he stood out against the isolation, the suspicion as to
his sanity, the patronizing pity of men who but a little while before
had felt honored when he spoke to them. For four months he gave battle
to unseen and silent foes compassing him on every side. He had no spirit
for the fight; his love of Dorothy Hallowell and his complete rout there
had taken the spirit out of him--and with it had gone that confidence in
himself and in his luck which had won him so many critical battles.
Then--He had been keeping up a large suite of offices, a staff of
clerks and stenographers and all the paraphernalia of the great and
successful lawyer. He had been spreading out the little business he got
in a not unsuccessful effort to make it appear big and growing. He now
gave up these offices and the costly pride, pomp and circumstance--left
with several thousand dollars owing. He took two small rooms in a
building tenanted by beginners and cheap shysters. He continued to live
at his club, where even the servants were subtly insolent to him; he
could see the time approaching when he might have to let himself be
dropped for failing to pay dues and bills.

He stared at his ruin in stupid and dazed amazement. Usually, to hear or
to read about such a catastrophe as this is to get a vague, rather
impressive notion of something picturesque and romantic. Ruined, like
all the big fateful words, has a dignified sound. But the historians and
novelists and poets and other keepers of human records have a pleasant,
but not very honest way, of omitting practically all the essentials from
their records and substituting glittering imaginings that delight the
reader--and wofully mislead him as to the truth about life. What wonder
that we learn slowly--and improve slowly. How wofully we have been, and
are, misled by all upon whom we have relied as teachers.

Already one of these charming tales of majestic downfall was in process
of manufacture, with Frederick Norman as the central figure. It was only
awaiting his suicide or some other mode of complete submergence for its
final glose of glamor. In this manufacture, the truth, as usual, had
been almo