de where it belongs--they
soon get poor and drop down and out."

Palmer's revelation of himself and of a philosophy which life
as it had revealed itself to her was incessantly urging her to
adopt so grappled her attention that she altogether forgot
herself. A man on his way to the scaffold who suddenly sees
and feels a cataclysm rocking the world about him forgets his
own plight. Unconsciously he was epitomizing, unconsciously
she was learning, the whole story of the progress of the race
upward from beast toward intellect--the brutal and bloody
building of the highway from the caves of darkness toward the
peaks of light. The source from which springs, and ever has
sprung, the cruelty of man toward man is the struggle of the
ambition of the few who see and insist upon better conditions,
with the inertia and incompetence of the many who have little
sight and less imagination. Ambition must use the inert
mass--must persuade it, if possible, must compel it by trick
or force if persuasion fails. But Palmer and Susan Lenox
were, naturally, not seeing the thing in the broad but only as
it applied to themselves.

"I've read a whole lot of history and biography," Freddie
went on, "and I've thought about what I read and about what's
going on around me. I tell you the world's full of cant. The
people who get there don't act on what is always preached.
The preaching isn't all lies--at least, I think not. But it
doesn't fit the facts a man or a woman has got to meet."

"I realized that long ago," said Susan.

"There's a saying that you can't touch pitch without being
defiled. Well--you can't build without touching pitch--at
least not in a world where money's king and where those with
brains have to live off of those without brains by making 'em
work and showing 'em what to work at. It's a hell of a world,
but _I_ didn't get it up."

"And we've got to live in it," said she, "and get out of it
the things we want and need."

"That's the talk!" cried Palmer. "I see you're 'on.' Now--to
make a long story short--you and I can get what we want. We
can help each other. You were better born than I am--you've
had a better training in manners and dress and all the classy
sort of things. I've got the money--and brains enough to
learn with--and I can help you in various ways. So--I propose
that we go up together."

"We've got--pasts," said Susan.

"Who hasn't that amounts to anything? Mighty few. No one
that's mad