equality of opportunity refused by the whole cruel system of to-day.

But Jeff could be in revolt without losing his temper. The men who
profited by present conditions were not monsters. They were as kind
of heart as he was, effects of the system just as much as the little
bootblack on the corner. No possible good could come of a blind hatred
of individuals.

His Bohemian instinct sent Jeff ranging far in those days. He made
friends out of the most unlikely material. Some of the most radical of
these were in the habit of gathering informally in his rooms about once
a week. Sometimes the talk was good and pungent. Much of it was merely
wild.

His college friend, Sam Miller, now assistant city librarian, was one
of this little circle. Another was Oscar Marchant, a fragile little
Socialist poet upon whom consumption had laid its grip. He was not much
of a poet, but there burnt in him a passion for humanity that disease
and poverty could not extinguish.

One night James Farnum dropped in to borrow some money from his cousin
and for ten minutes listened to such talk as he had never heard before.
His mind moved among a group of orthodox and accepted ideas. A new one
he always viewed as if it were a dynamite bomb timed to go off shortly.
He was not only suspicious of it; he was afraid of it.

James was, it happened, in evening dress. He took gingerly the chair his
cousin offered him between the hectic Marchant and a little Polish Jew.

The air was blue with the smoke from cheap tobacco. More than one of
those present carried the marks of poverty. But the note of the assembly
was a cheerful at-homeness. James wondered what the devil his cousin
meant by giving this heterogeneous gathering the freedom of his rooms.

Dickinson, the single-taxer, was talking bitterly. He was a big man with
a voice like a foghorn. His idea of emphasis appeared to be pounding the
table with his blacksmith fist.

"I tell you society doesn't want to hear about such things," he was
declaiming. "It wants to go along comfortably without being disturbed.
Ignore everything that's not pleasant, that's liable to harrow the
feelings. The sins of our neighbors make spicy reading. Fill the papers
with 'em. But their distresses and their poverty! That's different.
Let's hear as little about them as possible. Let's keep it a
well-regulated world."

Nearly everybody began to talk at once. James caught phrases here and
there out of the melee.

"... Demo