tween vagrancy
and crime is but a paper wall, and any hot-hearted insurrectionary may
break through it at will. But to accept the conditions of vagrancy one
must first embrace the loathsome thing itself. Griswold remembered the
glimpse he had had of himself in the bar mirror of the pot-house, and
the chains of his transformed identity began to gall him. It was to
little purpose that he girded at his compunctions, telling himself that
he was only playing a necessary part; that one needs must when the devil
drives. Custom, habit, convention, or whatever it may be which
differentiates between the law-abiding and the lawless, would have its
say; and from railing bitterly against the social conditions which made
his act at once a necessity and a crime, he began to feel a prickling
disgust for the subterfuges to which the crime had driven him.

Moreover, there was a growing fear that he might not always be able to
play consistently the double role whose lines were already becoming
intricate and confusing. To be true to his ideals, he must continue to
be in utter sincerity Griswold the brother-loving. That said itself. But
on the other hand, to escape the consequences of his act, he must hold
himself in instant readiness to be in savage earnest what a common thief
would be in similar straits; a thing of duplicity and double meanings
and ferocity, alert to turn and slay at any moment in the battle of
self-preservation.

He had thought that the supreme crisis was passed when, earlier in the
day, he had pawned the last of his keepsakes for the money to buy the
revolver. But he had yet to learn that there is no supreme crisis in the
human span, save that which ends it; that all the wayfaring duels with
fate are inconclusive; conflicts critical enough at the moment, but
lacking finality, and likely to be renewed indefinitely if one lives
beyond them.

He was confronting another of the false climaxes in the hour of aimless
wanderings on the river front. More than once he was tempted to buy back
his lost identity at any price. Never before had he realized what a
precious possession is the fearlessness of innocency; weighed against
it, the thick packet of bank-notes in the tramp's bundle, and all that
it might stand for, were as air-blown bubbles to refined gold. Yet he
would not go back; he could not go back. To restore the money would be
more than a confession of failure; it would be an abject recantation--a
flat denial of every