It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers and editors
were away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a
decision in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three
months or more. The consolation he drew from it was that a saving
in postage was effected by the deadlock. Only the robber-
publications seemed to remain actively in business, and to them
Martin disposed of all his early efforts, such as "Pearl-diving,"
"The Sea as a Career," "Turtle-catching," and "The Northeast
Trades." For these manuscripts he never received a penny. It is
true, after six months' correspondence, he effected a compromise,
whereby he received a safety razor for "Turtle-catching," and that
THE ACROPOLIS, having agreed to give him five dollars cash and five
yearly subscriptions: for "The Northeast Trades," fulfilled the
second part of the agreement.

For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a
Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold
taste and a penny-dreadful purse. "The Peri and the Pearl," a
clever skit of a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white
hot from his brain, won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco
magazine published in the interest of a great railroad. When the
editor wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin wrote
back to inquire if the transportation was transferable. It was
not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the
return of the poem. Back it came, with the editor's regrets, and
Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to THE HORNET, a
pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation of
the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist who founded it.
But THE HORNET'S light had begun to dim long before Martin was
born. The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the poem,
but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it. Several of
his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew
a reply. It was written by a new editor, who coolly informed
Martin that he declined to be held responsible for the old editor's
mistakes, and that he did not think much of "The Peri and the
Pearl" anyway.

But THE GLOBE, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel
treatment of all. He had refrained from offering his "Sea Lyrics"
for publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having
been rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in THE
GLOBE office. There were thirty poems in the collection, and he
was to receive a dollar apiece for them. The first month four were
published, and he promptly received a cheek for four dollars; but
when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter.
In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for instance,
being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to
"The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different
title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his
own, "Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track."
But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying. Martin
groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair.
Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled
about in the most incomprehensible manner. Sometimes lines and
stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He could not believe
that a sane editor could be guilty of such maltreatment, and his
favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have been doctored by
the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote immediately,
begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to return
them to him.

He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till
the thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a
check for those which had appeared in the current number.

Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the WHITE MOUSE
forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and
more to hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the
agricultural weeklies and trade journals, though among the
religious weeklies he found he could easily starve. At his lowest
ebb, when his black suit was in pawn, he made a ten-strike - or so
it seemed to him - in a prize contest arranged by the County
Committee of the Republican Party. There were three branches of
the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at himself bitterly
the while in that he was driven to such straits to live. His poem
won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second
prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the
Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was
very gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had
gone wrong in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a
state senator were members of it, the money was not forthcoming.
While this affair was hanging fire, he proved that he understood
the principles of the Democratic Party by winning the first prize
for his essay in a similar contest. And, moreover, he received the
money, twenty-five dollars. But the forty dollars won in the first
contest he never received.

Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long
walk from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too
much time, he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle.
The latter gave him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and
enabled him to see Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck
trousers and an old sweater made him a presentable wheel costume,
so that he could go with Ruth on afternoon rides. Besides, he no
longer had opportunity to see much of her in her own home, where
Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her campaign of
entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and to whom he had
looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no
longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard
times, disappointments, and close application to work, and the
conversation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly
egotistic. He measured the narrowness of their minds by the minds
of the thinkers in the books he read. At Ruth's home he never met
a large mind, with the exception of Professor Caldwell, and
Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the rest, they were
numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. It was
their ignorance that astounded him. What was the matter with them?
What had they done with their educations? They had had access to
the same books he had. How did it happen that they had drawn
nothing from them?

He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers,
existed. He had his proofs from the books, the books that had
educated him beyond the Morse standard. And he knew that higher
intellects than those of the Morse circle were to be found in the
world. He read English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses
of men and women talking politics and philosophy. And he read of
salons in great cities, even in the United States, where art and
intellect congregated. Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived
that all well-groomed persons above the working class were persons
with power of intellect and vigor of beauty. Culture and collars
had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing
that college educations and mastery were the same things.

Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take
Ruth with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she
would shine anywhere. As it was clear to him that he had been
handicapped by his early environment, so now he perceived that she
was similarly handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand.
The books on her father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the
music on the piano - all was just so much meretricious display. To
real literature, real painting, real music, the Morses and their
kind, were dead. And bigger than such things was life, of which
they were densely, hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their
Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative
broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative
science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their
thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older - the same that
moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved
the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib;
that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe
out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the
famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so
scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a
notorious scrawl on the page of history.

So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him
that the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men,
and bank cashiers he had met and the members of the working class
he had known was on a par with the difference in the food they ate,
clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly,
in all of them was lacking the something more which he found in
himself and in the books. The Morses had shown him the best their
social position could produce, and he was not impressed by it. A
pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the
superior of those he met at the Morses'; and, when his one decent
suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of
life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would
suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.

"You hate and fear the socialists," he remarked to Mr. Morse, one
evening at dinner; "but why? You know neither them nor their
doctrines."

The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse,
who had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood. The
cashier was Martin's black beast, and his temper was a trifle short
where the talker of platitudes was concerned.

"Yes," he had said, "Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising
young man - somebody told me as much. And it is true. He'll make
the Governor's Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the
United States Senate."

"What makes you think so?" Mrs. Morse had inquired.

"I've heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid
and unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot
help but regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so
much like the platitudes of the average voter that - oh, well, you
know you flatter any man by dressing up his own thoughts for him
and presenting them to him."

"I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood," Ruth had chimed
in.

"Heaven forbid!"

The look of horror on Martin's face stirred Mrs. Morse to
belligerence.

"You surely don't mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?" she
demanded icily.

"No more than the average Republican," was the retort, "or average
Democrat, either. They are all stupid when they are not crafty,
and very few of them are crafty. The only wise Republicans are the
millionnaires and their conscious henchmen. They know which side
their bread is buttered on, and they know why."

"I am a Republican," Mr. Morse put in lightly. "Pray, how do you
classify me?"

"Oh, you are an unconscious henchman."

"Henchman?"

"Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no working-class nor
criminal practice. You don't depend upon wife-beaters and
pickpockets for your income. You get your livelihood from the
masters of society, and whoever feeds a man is that man's master.
Yes, you are a henchman. You are interested in advancing the
interests of the aggregations of capital you serve."

Mr. Morse's face was a trifle red.

"I confess, sir," he said, "that you talk like a scoundrelly
socialist."

Then it was that Martin made his remark:

"You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You know neither them
nor their doctrines."

"Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism," Mr. Morse replied,
while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse
beamed happily at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege
lord's antagonism.

"Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty,
equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a
socialist," Martin said with a smile. "Because I question
Jefferson and the unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind,
does not make me a socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far
nearer socialism than I who am its avowed enemy."

"Now you please to be facetious," was all the other could say.

"Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in
equality, and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the
corporations, from day to day, are busily engaged in burying
equality. And you call me a socialist because I deny equality,
because I affirm just what you live up to. The Republicans are
foes to equality, though most of them fight the battle against
equality with the very word itself the slogan on their lips. In
the name of equality they destroy equality. That was why I called
them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe the
race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Such is the lesson
I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned. As
I said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary
and eternal foe of socialism."

"But you frequent socialist meetings," Mr. Morse challenged.

"Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you
to learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their
meetings. They are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have
read the books. Any one of them knows far more about sociology and
all the other ologies than the average captain of industry. Yes, I
have been to half a dozen of their meetings, but that doesn't make
me a socialist any more than hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me
a Republican."

"I can't help it," Mr. Morse said feebly, "but I still believe you
incline that way."

Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn't know what I was
talking about. He hasn't understood a word of it. What did he do
with his education, anyway?

Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with
economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to
him a grisly monster. Personally, he was an intellectual moralist,
and more offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the
morality of those about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the
economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.

A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home.
His sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious
young mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly
learning the trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair
shop. Also, having got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel,
he was prosperous. Marian had called on Martin in his room a short
time before to announce her engagement, during which visit she had
playfully inspected Martin's palm and told his fortune. On her
next visit she brought Hermann von Schmidt along with her. Martin
did the honors and congratulated both of them in language so easy
and graceful as to affect disagreeably the peasant-mind of his
sister's lover. This bad impression was further heightened by
Martin's reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse with which
he had commemorated Marian's previous visit. It was a bit of
society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named "The Palmist."
He was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment
in his sister's face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon
her betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that
worthy's asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen
disapproval. The incident passed over, they made an early
departure, and Martin forgot all about it, though for the moment he
had been puzzled that any woman, even of the working class, should
not have been flattered and delighted by having poetry written
about her.

Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone.
Nor did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him
sorrowfully for what he had done.

"Why, Marian," he chided, "you talk as though you were ashamed of
your relatives, or of your brother at any rate."

"And I am, too," she blurted out.

Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her
eyes. The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.

"But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing
poetry about my own sister?"

"He ain't jealous," she sobbed. "He says it was indecent, ob -
obscene."

Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded
to resurrect and read a carbon copy of "The Palmist."

"I can't see it," he said finally, proffering the manuscript to
her. "Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene
- that was the word, wasn't it?"

"He says so, and he ought to know," was the answer, with a wave
aside of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing. "And
he says you've got to tear it up. He says he won't have no wife of
his with such things written about her which anybody can read. He
says it's a disgrace, an' he won't stand for it."

"Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense," Martin
began; then abruptly changed his mind.

He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting
to convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was
absurd and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.

"All right," he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen
pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.

He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original
type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York
magazine. Marian and her husband would never know, and neither
himself nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless
poem ever were published.

Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.

"Can I?" she pleaded.

He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the
torn pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her
jacket - ocular evidence of the success of her mission. She
reminded him of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and
gorgeous flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the
working class whom he had seen twice. But they were on a par, the
pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he smiled with inward
amusement at the caprice of his fancy which suggested the
appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse's drawing-room. The
amusement faded, and he was aware of a great loneliness. This
sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were milestones of the
road he had travelled. And he had left them behind. He glanced
affectionately about him at his few books. They were all the
comrades left to him.

"Hello, what's that?" he demanded in startled surprise.

Marian repeated her question.

"Why don't I go to work?" He broke into a laugh that was only
half-hearted. "That Hermann of yours has been talking to you."

She shook her head.

"Don't lie," he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his
charge.

"Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business;
that when I write poetry about the girl he's keeping company with
it's his business, but that outside of that he's got no say so.
Understand?

"So you don't think I'll succeed as a writer, eh?" he went on.
"You think I'm no good? - that I've fallen down and am a disgrace
to the family?"

"I think it would be much better if you got a job," she said
firmly, and he saw she was sincere. "Hermann says - "

"Damn Hermann!" he broke out good-naturedly. "What I want to know
is when you're going to get married. Also, you find out from your
Hermann if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present
from me."

He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice
broke out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and
her betrothed, all the members of his own class and the members of
Ruth's class, directing their narrow little lives by narrow little
formulas - herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their
lives by one another's opinions, failing of being individuals and
of really living life because of the childlike formulas by which
they were enslaved. He summoned them before him in apparitional
procession: Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler,
Hermann von Schmidt cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by
one and in pairs he judged them and dismissed them - judged them by
the standards of intellect and morality he had learned from the
books. Vainly he asked: Where are the great souls, the great men
and women? He found them not among the careless, gross, and stupid
intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow room.
He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her
swine. When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself
alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and unsummoned. Martin
watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted
coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had
once been he.

"You were like all the rest, young fellow," Martin sneered. "Your
morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did
not think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes,
were ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You
were cock of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing.
You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to, - you know
you really despised it, - but because the other fellows patted you
on the shoulder. You licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn't give
in, and you wouldn't give in partly because you were an abysmal
brute and for the rest because you believed what every one about
you believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivorous
ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow-creatures'
anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won other fellows' girls away
from them, not because you wanted the girls, but because in the
marrow of those about you, those who set your moral pace, was the
instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well, the years
have passed, and what do you think about it now?"

As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. The
stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder
garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of
the eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from
an inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge. The
apparition was very like his present self, and, as he regarded it,
he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book
over which it pored. He glanced at the title and read, "The
Science of AEsthetics." Next, he entered into the apparition,
trimmed the student-lamp, and himself went on reading "The Science
of AEsthetics."