s
eyes, Freeland gray, were a little buffed over by sedentary habit, and
the number of things that he was conscious of. For instance, that the
people passing him were distressingly plain, both men and women; plain
with the particular plainness of those quite unaware of it. It struck
him forcibly, while he went along, how very queer it was that with so
many plain people in the country, the population managed to keep up even
as well as it did. To his wonderfully keen sense of defect, it seemed
little short of marvellous. A shambling, shoddy crew, this crowd
of shoppers and labor demonstrators! A conglomeration of hopelessly
mediocre visages! What was to be done about it? Ah! what indeed!--since
they were evidently not aware of their own dismal mediocrity. Hardly
a beautiful or a vivid face, hardly a wicked one, never anything
transfigured, passionate, terrible, or grand. Nothing Greek, early
Italian, Elizabethan, not even beefy, beery, broad old Georgian.
Something clutched-in, and squashed-out about it all--on that collective
face something of the look of a man almost comfortably and warmly
wrapped round by a snake at the very beginning of its squeeze. It gave
Felix Freeland a sort of faint excitement and pleasure to notice this.
For it was his business to notice things, and embalm them afterward
in ink. And he believed that not many people noticed it, so that it
contributed in his mind to his own distinction, which was precious to
him. Precious, and encouraged to be so by the press, which--as he well
knew--must print his name several thousand times a year. And yet, as a
man of culture and of principle, how he despised that kind of fame, and
theoretically believed that a man's real distinction lay in his oblivion
of the world's opinion, particularly as expressed by that flighty
creature, the Fourth Estate. But here again, as in the matter of the
gray top hat, he had instinctively compromised, taking in press cuttings
which described himself and his works, while he never failed to describe
those descriptions--good, bad, and indifferent--as 'that stuff,' and
their writers as 'those fellows.'

Not that it was new to him to feel that the country was in a bad way.
On the contrary, it was his established belief, and one for which he was
prepared to furnish due and proper reasons. In the first place he traced
it to the horrible hold Industrialism had in the last hundred years laid
on the nation, draining the peasantry from 'the