ignificant matters
of mere surface. Nationality, trade, class no more affect the oneness of
mankind than do the ocean's surface variations of color or weather
affect its unchangeable chemistry. Waugh, who had risen from the ranks,
Howells, who had begun as shipping clerk, despised those above whom they
had risen, regarded as the peculiar weaknesses of the working classes
such universal failings as prejudice, short-sightedness, and shirking.
They lost no opportunity to show their lack of sympathy with the class
from which they had sprung and to which they still belonged in reality,
their devotion to the class plutocratic to which they aspired. Arthur,
in losing the narrowness of the class from which he had been ejected,
lost all class narrowness. The graduates from the top have the best
chance to graduate into the wide, wide world of human brotherhood. By an
artificial process--by compulsion, vanity, reason, love--he became what
Madelene was by nature. She was one of those rare human beings born with
a just and clear sense of proportion. It was thus impossible for her to
exaggerate into importance the trivial differences of mental stature.
She saw that they were no greater than the differences of men's physical
stature, if men be compared with mountains or any other just measure of
the vast scale on which the universe is constructed. And so it came
naturally to her to appreciate that the vital differences among men are
matters of character and usefulness, just as among things they are
matters of beauty and use.

Arthur's close friend was now Laurent Tague, a young cooper--huge,
deep-chested, tawny, slow of body and swift of mind. They had been
friends as boys at school. When Arthur came home from Exeter from his
first long vacation, their friendship had been renewed after a fashion,
then had ended abruptly in a quarrel and a pitched battle, from which
neither had emerged victor, both leaving the battle ground exhausted and
anguished by a humiliating sense of defeat. From that time Laurent had
been a "damned mucker" to Arthur, Arthur a "stuck-up smart Alec" to
Laurent. The renewal of the friendship dated from the accident to
Arthur's hand; it rapidly developed as he lost the sense of patronizing
Laurent, and as Laurent for his part lost the suspicion that Arthur was
secretly patronizing him. Then Arthur discovered that Lorry had, several
years before, sent for a catalogue of the University of Michigan, had
selected a cour