o maintain a steadfast conviction were the purity of the
Conservative party of Canada and the awful wickedness of the recall of
judges.

But with all that the judge was hardly civil to Pupkin. He hadn't asked
him to the house till Zena brought him there, though, as a rule, all the
bank clerks in Mariposa treated Judge Pepperleigh's premises as their
own. He used to sit and sneer at Pupkin after he had gone till Zena
would throw down the Pioneers of Tecumseh Township in a temper and
flounce off the piazza to her room. After which the judge's manner would
change instantly and he would relight his corn cob pipe and sit and
positively beam with contentment. In all of which there was something so
mysterious as to prove that Mr. Pupkin's chances were hopeless.

Nor was that all of it. Pupkin's salary was eight hundred dollars a year
and the Exchange Bank limit for marriage was a thousand.

I suppose you are aware of the grinding capitalistic tyranny of the
banks in Mariposa whereby marriage is put beyond the reach of ever so
many mature and experienced men of nineteen and twenty and twenty-one,
who are compelled to go on eating on a meal ticket at the Mariposa House
and living over the bank to suit the whim of a group of capitalists.

Whenever Pupkin thought of this two hundred dollars he understood all
that it meant by social unrest. In fact, he interpreted all forms of
social discontent in terms of it. Russian Anarchism, German Socialism,
the Labour Movement, Henry George, Lloyd George,--he understood the
whole lot of them by thinking of his two hundred dollars.

When I tell you that at this period Mr. Pupkin read Memoirs of the
Great Revolutionists and even thought of blowing up Henry Mullins with
dynamite, you can appreciate his state of mind.

But not even by all these hindrances and obstacles to his love for Zena
Pepperleigh would Peter Pupkin have been driven to commit suicide (oh,
yes; he committed it three times, as I'm going to tell you), had it not
been for another thing that he knew stood once and for all and in cold
reality between him and Zena.

He felt it in a sort of way, as soon as he knew her. Each time that he
tried to talk to her about his home and his father and mother and found
that something held him back, he realized more and more the kind of
thing that stood between them. Most of all did he realize it, with a
sudden sickness of heart, when he got word that his father and mother
wanted to come