And here was a new confusion. The pages of the books no longer lived. The woman, sitting there, but a few feet away from me, across the little court, I did not want. Of that I was quite sure. She was another man’s wife. What thoughts had she in her head, what feelings had she? Her face was round and fair and she had blue eyes. What did she want? Children perhaps, I thought. She wanted to have a house like all the other houses lived in by the people of her home town who had made money and who held positions of some importance in the town’s life. One day she sat on a bench in the park and I, walking past, saw the title of the book she read. It was a popular novel of the day but I have forgotten its name and the name of its author. Even at that time, although I knew little enough, I did know that such books had always been written, would always be written, books that sold by the hundreds of thousands and were often proclaimed as great works of art and that after a year or two were utterly forgotten. In them was no sense of strangeness, no wonder about life. They lacked the touch of life. “Dead books for men and women who dare not live,” I thought contemptuously. There was a kind of pretense of solving some problem of life but the problem was so childishly stated that later a childish solution seemed quite natural and right. A young man came to an American city from a country town and, although at bottom he was true and fine, the city for a time diverted him from his noble aims. He committed some near crime that made both himself and the girl he really loved suffer terribly, but she stood firmly by him and at the last, and with her help, he pulled himself up again, by the bootstraps as it were, and became a rich manufacturer who was kind to his employees. The book she read expressed perhaps the high-school girl’s dream, the dream she had when she married and came to Chicago. Was her dream the same now? I had already, as far as I reacted to the life about me at all, started upon another road, was becoming, a little, the eternal questioner of myself and others. Not for me the standardized little pellets of opinion, the little neatly wrapped packages of sentiment the magazine writers had learned to do up, I told myself. In modern factories food was packed in convenient standard-sized packages and I half suspected that behind the high-sounding labels the food was often enough sawdust or something of the sort. It was apparent publishers also had learned to do up neat packages containing sawdust and put bright-colored labels on them.