thought they had hedged their trades about with so much skill that
they had banished competition, found that they had only succeeded in
bringing into the field the machine that banished them. And everywhere
there was such ghastly poverty,--poverty of body and brain and soul.
We had gone back to patrons and patronesses. Men or women did not do
anything of themselves any more,--they did not sing or play, or give a
reading, or exhibit a painting. They starved, or they performed or
exhibited 'under the auspices of.' It has always been the same. Given
a pure democracy, and demos reigns sooner or later. The shiftless go
to the bottom, the thrifty to the top, and then like the upper and
nether millstones, they grind everything between them. That which is
below cries, 'Alms!' and that which is above responds, 'Largesse,' and
the voice that cries, 'Justice,' is stifled between. The stone that
crushed from above and the rock that ground from below were very near,
and men dreaded them, for when the grist is ground, and flint strikes
upon flint, the conflagration is at hand. Do you think I am talking
like a Populist campaign book? I only know what I saw, and what the
poets have said. I wouldn't dare to be as radical as Lowell, nor as
bitter as Tennyson, nor as savage as Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Hugo. We
had overcome the sharpness of death, but whence could we hope for
deliverance from the sharpness of living?"

"We have been delivered," said Adam, slowly, "but you don't seem
disposed to be the Miriam of this Israel--limited."

"Well, no," answered Robin. "I should like to believe that you and I
were rewarded for our superhuman excellence by being saved when
Pharaoh and his multitudes went under, but a somewhat wide
acquaintance with other people forbids. On the other hand, we can't
have been left on account of our superlative badness. Truly, Adam,
don't you feel sometimes as if you would rather have died with the
rest?"

He hesitated. The question was so unexpected, and so fraught with
possibilities. She watched the struggle in his face and honored him
for it. He put back a stray lock of hair and kissed her forehead
before he answered.

"The streak of cowardice that we all of us have in us," he said
finally, "the distrust of myself, and the doubt of all systems of life
of which I know anything, prompts me to answer yes; for I think even
if we had died, you and I would still be together. I think sometimes
we have been, in the pa