se of a
college professor. My heart gave a great leap. Here was hope! But no;
he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of
space till my financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed. I
communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has
been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery. His nerve
centres of judgment and will have not been employed in solving the
problems of life, but in maintaining his own solvency by the insolvency
of others. He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune.
He transmutes tears into treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs
himself in clean linen and develops the round of his belly. He is a
bloodsucker and a vampire. He lays unholy hands on heaven and hell at
cent. per cent., and his very existence is a sacrilege and a blasphemy.
And yet here am I, wilting before him, an arrant coward, with no respect
for him and less for myself. Why should this shame be? Let me rouse in
my strength and smite him, and, by so doing, wipe clean one offensive
page.

But no. As I said, he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, and in it
was the aristocrat's undisguised contempt for the _canaille_. Behind him
was the solid phalanx of a bourgeois society. Law and order upheld him,
while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge. Moreover, he was
possessed of a formula whereby to extract juice from a flattened lemon,
and he would do business with me.

I told him my desires humbly, in quavering syllables. In return, he
craved my antecedents and residence, pried into my private life,
insolently demanded how many children had I and did I live in wedlock,
and asked divers other unseemly and degrading questions. Ay, I was
treated like a thief convicted before the act, till I produced my
certificates of goods and chattels aforementioned. Never had they
appeared so insignificant and paltry as then, when he sniffed over them
with the air of one disdainfully doing a disagreeable task. It is said,
"Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of
victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury"; but he evidently
was not my brother, for he demanded seventy per cent. I put my signature
to certain indentures, received my pottage, and fled from his presence.

Faugh! I was glad to be quit of it. How good the outside air was! I
only prayed that neither my best friend nor my worst enemy