dreds of thousands of young men and women beginning to go to work. Children were sprouting everywhere like grass from top-soil; into New York Bay the immigrant ships were bearing every month their cargos of able bodies; there was a perpetual movement upward of general financial condition, a rising tide of bank deposits, bathtubs, sanitary plumbing, shined shoes, college educations. Nevertheless, strangely, the air was motionless and heavy and stagnant like the air in windless close August nights. No current of wind broke through the glassy calm and set the body breathing. Everything—friends, neighbours, classmates—was curiously pressing life downward into inertia; bearing down toward the mediocre existing form of it; patting the world of good-enough with the vigour of new lives. Every year, new hordes of youth came to fortify it with their blood; to fit themselves willingly into the dull form of it and let it grow mightier through them, and become in turn emblems of it in the forms of sales managers, bank cashiers, smart story writers, insurance brokers, automobile mechanics, advertising wizards; all admirably adjusted to the immoral, untightened thing which existed. There was always a position in some business house drawing like a magnet. And behind that, there was always a neat approved two-family home, and behind that, a neat approved girl of the sort the family would like. There had seemed no way.
More richly almost than any other member of his generation in the land, he had stored within him that principle of growth against which the self-repression of a community, its passive resistance to "the effort of reason and the adventure of beauty" wages a silent incessant war of attrition. Bourne was a cripple; he was the son of unfine, conventional, immobile American society; but the seeds of fineness burned in him, and made him a wedge of crimson into the dun, the timorousness, the cheap self-satisfaction of his community. The whole of him was directed towards development. The first time one saw the man, one saw, perhaps, the crippled frame, the poor twisted ear, and shrank involuntarily from them. They were gone the second time; gone never again to obtrude. Only the long sensitive Gothic face remained; the fine musician's hands with their delightful language; the joyous, youthful, certain dance of the mind. One knew, and women knew it no less positively than did men, that through the appearance of this being a
