He had long known, of course, that to say the word “bourgeois” with contempt was a little bit old-fashioned, and he did his utmost not to; yet was there a still small voice within him that would whisper: “Those people--I want to and I do treat them as my equals. I have even gone so far of late years as to dress like them, to play their games, to eat regularly, to drink little, to love decorously, with many other bourgeois virtues, but in spite of all I remain where I was, an inhabitant of another--” and, just as he thought the whispering voice was going to die away, it would add hurriedly--“and a better world.” It worried him; and he would diligently examine the premises of that small secret conclusion, hoping to find a flaw in the justness of his conviction that he was superior. But he never did; and for a long time he could not discover why. Often the conduct of the “bourgeois” would strike him as almost superfluously good. They were brave, much braver than he was conscious of being; clean-thinking, oh, far more clean-thinking than a man like himself, necessarily given to visions of all kinds; they were straightforward, almost ridiculously so, as it seemed to one who saw the inside-out of everything almost before he saw the outside-out; they were simple, as touchingly simple as those little children, to whom Scriptures and post-impressionism had combined to award the crown of wisdom; they were kind and self-denying in a way that often made him feel quite desperately his own selfishness--and yet--they were inferior. It was simply maddening that he could never rid himself of that impression. It was one November afternoon, while talking with another artist, that the simple reason struck him with extraordinary force and clarity: _He could make them, and they could not make him!_