, while he told me in that deliberate American
voice of his and with the deliberate American solemnity, of his desire
to "do some decent thing with life."

He was very anxious to set himself completely before me, I remember, on
that occasion. There was a peculiar mental kinship between us that even
the profound differences of our English and American trainings could not
mask. And now he told me almost everything material about his life. For
the first time I learnt how enormously rich he was, not only by reason
of his father's acquisitions, but also because of his own almost
instinctive aptitude for business. "I've got," he said, "to begin with,
what almost all men spend their whole lives in trying to get. And it
amounts to nothing. It leaves me with life like a blank sheet of paper,
and nothing in particular to write on it."

"You know," he said, "it's--exasperating. I'm already half-way to
three-score and ten, and I'm still wandering about wondering what to do
with this piece of life God has given me...."

He had "lived" as people say, he had been in scrapes and scandals,
tasted to the full the bitter intensities of the personal life; he had
come by a different route to the same conclusions as myself, was as
anxious as I to escape from memories and associations and feuds and that
excessive vividness of individual feeling which blinds us to the common
humanity, the common interest, the gentler, larger reality, which lies
behind each tawdrily emphatic self....

"It's a sort of inverted homoeopathy I want," he said. "The big thing to
cure the little thing...."

But I will say no more of that side of our friendship, because the ideas
of it are spread all through this book from the first page to the
last.... What concerns me now is not our sympathy and agreement, but
that other aspect of our relations in which Gidding becomes impulse and
urgency. "Seeing we have these ideas," said he,--"and mind you there
must be others who have them or are getting to them, for nobody thinks
all alone in this world,--seeing we have these ideas what are we going
to _do_?"

Sec. 10

That meeting was followed by another before I left New York, and
presently Gidding joined me at Denver, where I was trying to measure the
true significance of a labor paper called _The Appeal to Reason_ that,
in spite of a rigid boycott by the ordinary agencies for news
distribution went out in the middle west to nearly half a million
subscribers, and w