As he stood and watched the crowd he found it necessary to ask himself the words: “What gave its slyly amused signal for this plaintive race through the centuries?” He also found it necessary to answer: “A languid idiot, much in need of consolation, refuses to abandon his dream.” Here and there, apart from the main lunge of the crowd, were men and women, standing still, as though motion had betrayed them, or loitering in a carelessly placid fashion. Vacancy and indecision tampered with most of their faces. “How many minor poets have stood upon these street corners, making arrangements for a gradual and unnoticed death?” he asked himself, with the sentimental self-importance of youth. But the stage hands clamored that he was neglecting the play--a habit falsely known as laziness--and that, with appropriate cunning, they had erected this city scene so that he and hordes of others should find it difficult to forget their tamely borrowed lines. With an uncomplaining wrench he returned to his surface role of a youth sent out in weakly gruesome clothes to look for some task that would begin to answer the flatly strident requests of an average life. The humble stupor fell back upon his shoulders and he walked to a bench in a public square, seated himself, and read the “want-ad” section of a newspaper. He spied, with a prostrate frown, the barren jest of: “Wanted--Young man for clerical work; must be neat, industrious, wide-awake, sober, well educated, reliable, good at details, ambitious, honest, painstaking; salary twelve dollars a week.” He muttered certain useless words to himself. “The illusion of a reluctant penny for fresh vigor. If the applicant is morbidly patient and reasonably deft at following orders he may after many years attain the virtue of writing the same trivially unfair appeal to other men. And even that exquisite victory is uncertain.” He saw that as usual his only choice rested between an office-boy’s task, dignified by the title of junior clerk to make it more enticing, and unskilled manual labor. “Now, how will you become tired--mentally or physically?” he asked himself with great formality.