In addition to this I was filled with an intense sympathy for the woes of others, life in all its helpless degradation and poverty, the unsatisfied dreams of people, their sweaty labors, the things they were compelled to endure—nameless impositions, curses, brutalities—the things they would never have, their hungers, thirsts, half-formed dreams of pleasure, their gibbering insanities and beaten resignations at the end. I have sobbed dry sobs looking into what I deemed to be broken faces and the eyes of human failures. A shabby tumbledown district or doorway, a drunken woman being arraigned before a magistrate, a child dying in a hospital, a man or woman injured in an accident—the times unbidden tears have leaped to my eyes and my throat has become parched and painful over scenes of the streets, the hospitals, the jails! I have cried so often that I have felt myself to be a weakling; at other times I have been proud of them and of my great rages against fate and the blundering, inept cruelty of life. If there is a God, conscious and personal, and He considers the state of man and the savagery of His laws and His indifferences, how He must smile at little insect man’s estimate of Him! It is so flattering, so fatuously unreasoning, that only a sardonic devil could enjoy it. I was happy enough in my work although at times despondent lest all the pleasures that can come to youth from health, courage, wealth and opportunity should fail me while I was working and trying to get somewhere. I had health yet I imagined I had not because I was not a Sandow, an athlete, and my stomach, due to an undiscovered appendix, gave me some trouble. As to courage, when I examined myself in that direction I fancied that I had none at all. Would I slip out if a dangerous brawl were brewing anywhere? Certainly. Well, then, I was a coward. Could I stand up and defend myself against a man of my own height and weight? I doubted it, particularly if he were well-trained. In consequence, I was again a coward. There was no hope for me among decently courageous men. Could I play tennis, baseball, football? No; not successfully. Assuredly I was a weakling of the worst kind. Nearly everybody could do those things, and nearly all youths were far more proficient in all the niceties of life than was I: manners, dancing, knowledge of dress and occasions. Hence I was a fool. The dullest athlete of the least proficiency could overcome me; the most minute society man, if socially correct, was infinitely my superior. Hence what had I to hope for? And when it came to wealth and opportunity, how poor I seemed! No girl of real beauty and force would have anything to do with a man who was not a success; and so there I was, a complete failure to begin with.