f others,
whether he calls himself by the fine name of student or confesses to
being simply lazy. At the same time our system is elastic enough to
give free play to every instinct of human nature which does not aim at
dominating others or living on the fruit of others' labor. There is
not only the remission by indemnification but the remission by
abnegation. Any man in his thirty-third year, his term of service
being then half done, can obtain an honorable discharge from the army,
provided he accepts for the rest of his life one half the rate of
maintenance other citizens receive. It is quite possible to live on
this amount, though one must forego the luxuries and elegancies of
life, with some, perhaps, of its comforts."

When the ladies retired that evening, Edith brought me a book and
said:--

"If you should be wakeful to-night, Mr. West, you might be interested
in looking over this story by Berrian. It is considered his
masterpiece, and will at least give you an idea what the stories
nowadays are like."

I sat up in my room that night reading "Penthesilia" till it grew gray
in the east, and did not lay it down till I had finished it. And yet
let no admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth century resent
my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was not so
much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The
story-writers of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without
straw a light task compared with the construction of a romance from
which should be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of
wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and
refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and
ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer,
together with sordid anxieties of any sort for one's self or others; a
romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love
unfretted by artificial barriers created by differences of station or
possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart. The reading of
"Penthesilia" was of more value than almost any amount of explanation
would have been in giving me something like a general impression of
the social aspect of the twentieth century. The information Dr. Leete
had imparted was indeed extensive as to facts, but they had affected
my mind as so many separate impressions, which I had as yet succeeded
but imperfectly in making cohere. Berrian put them together for me in
a picture