ugh 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.

[1] I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in
the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the