world, until he has built a house. I submit this
proposition to anybody who has tried it, or to any one who is going to
try it. There is not a single kind or type of man who sooner or later
will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter with
him, into your house. The house becomes a kind of miniature model (such
as they have in expositions) of what is the matter with people. You
enter the door, you walk inside and brood over them. Everything you come
upon, from the white cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on
in the roof, reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what
is the matter with them. It is the new houses that are haunted now. Any
man who is sensitive to houses and to people and who would sit down in
his house when it is finished and look about in it seriously, and think
of all the people that have been built, in solid wood and stone, into
it, would get up softly and steal out of it, out of the front door of
it, and never enter that house again.

This is what Non saw. He saw how people felt about their houses, and how
they lived in them helplessly and angrily year after year, and felt
hateful about the world.

I gradually drew out of him the way he felt about it. I found he was not
as good as some people are at talking about himself, but the subject was
interesting. He began his career building houses for people, as nearly
every one does. The general idea is that everybody is expected to exact
commissions from everybody else, and the owner is expected to pay each
man his own commission and then pay all the commissions that each man
has charged the other man. Every house that got built in this way seemed
to be a kind of network or conspiracy of not doing as you would be done
by. Non did not see any way out at first, just for one man. He merely
noticed how things were going, and he noticed that nearly every person
that he had dealings with, from the bottom to the top of the house,
seemed to make him feel that he either was, or would be, or ought to be,
a grafter. He could not so much as look at a house he had built, through
the trees when he was going by, without wishing he could be a better
man, and studying on how it could be managed. His own first houses made
him see things. They proved to be the making of him, and if similar
houses have not made similar men, it is their fault. It might not be
reassuring to the men who are now living in these first houses to dwell
too m