totality of his world.

CHAPTER XXI

There were many days now, three months all told, in which Eugene
obtained insight into the workaday world such as he had not previously
had. It is true he had worked before in somewhat this fashion, but his
Chicago experience was without the broad philosophic insight which had
come to him since. Formerly the hierarchies of power in the universe and
on earth were inexplicable to him--all out of order; but here, where he
saw by degrees ignorant, almost animal intelligence, being directed by
greater, shrewder, and at times it seemed to him possibly malicious
intelligences--he was not quite sure about that--who were so strong that
the weaker ones must obey them, he began to imagine that in a rough way
life might possibly be ordered to the best advantage even under this
system. It was true that men quarreled here with each other as to who
should be allowed to lead. There was here as elsewhere great seeking for
the privileges and honors of direction and leadership in such petty
things as the proper piling of lumber, the planing of boards, the making
of desks and chairs, and men were grimly jealous of their talents and
abilities in these respects, but in the main it was the jealousy that
makes for ordered, intelligent control. All were striving to do the work
of intelligence, not of unintelligence. Their pride, however ignorant it
might be, was in the superior, not the inferior. They might complain of
their work, snarl at each other, snarl at their bosses, but after all it
was because they were not able or permitted to do the higher work and
carry out the orders of the higher mind. All were striving to do
something in a better way, a superior way, and to obtain the honors and
emoluments that come from doing anything in a superior way. If they were
not rewarded according to their estimate of their work there was wrath
and opposition and complaint and self-pity, but the work of the superior
intelligence was the thing which each in his blind, self-seeking way was
apparently trying to do.

Because he was not so far out of his troubles that he could be forgetful
of them, and because he was not at all certain that his talent to paint
was ever coming back to him, he was not as cheerful at times as he might
have been; but he managed to conceal it pretty well. This one thought
with its attendant ills of probable poverty and obscurity were terrible
to him. Time was slipping away and youth.