And now I was stumbling about in the dark streets of an Ohio manufacturing town poking sharp sticks into the tender flesh of myself and others. There was no one to refute any smart thing I thought and so I had a good time. Like everyone else I would so love to go through life criticizing everyone else and withholding from others any right to criticize me. Oh, the joy of being a king a pope or an emperor! “Suppose,” I now thought, “everyone in America really hungers for a more direct and subtle expression of our common lives than we have ever yet had and that we are all only terribly afraid we won’t get it.” The notion seemed good. It would explain so much. For one thing it would explain the common boredom with life and with work characteristic of so many so-called successful men I had met. Whether he was a successful railroad-builder or a successful writer of magazine short stories, the brighter man always seemed bored. Also it would explain beautifully our American fear of the highbrow. Suppose the brighter men were really having a good time--on the sly as it were--well, laughing up their sleeves. And suppose some fellow were to come along who was really on to the entire emptiness of the whole success theory of life, the whole absurd business of building bigger and bigger towns, bigger and bigger factories, bigger and bigger houses, but had decided not to be a reformer and scold about it. I fancied such a one going blandly about and really laughing, not fake laughing as in the newspaper funny strips, made by poor driven slaves who think they must be rich or silly to get fun out of life, getting the old American laugh back again, the laugh that came from far down inside, an American Falstaff kind of a laugh. Well, now I had got myself into deep water. I had fancied into existence a man I had not nerve or brains enough to be myself and one never likes that. The figure my fancy had made annoyed me as I am sure he would everyone else. I had gone in the darkness down along a spur of a railroad track to where my factory had formerly stood and there it was, much as I had left it except that my name had been taken off the front. There was a wall of the building that looked up toward the railroad station and there I had once put a big sign on which was my name in letters three feet high. How proud I had been when the sign was first put up. “Oh, glorious day! I a manufacturer!” To be sure I did not own the building but strangers would think I did. And now my name was gone and another man’s name, in letters as large as I had once used, was in its place. I went near the building trying to spell out the new name in the darkness, hating the name with instinctive jealousy, and a man came out at a door of the factory and walked toward me. Oh Lord, it was the former school-teacher, the man who had once been my night watchman and who was now evidently night watchman for my successor. Would he recognize me, lurking about the place of my former grandeur?