This was the reality, at any rate, which the young reporter saw, and which, as he says, broadened considerably his viewpoint, finally liberating him “from moralistic and religionistic qualms.” So liberated was he, indeed, that he came to judge men “thoroughly sound intellectually” in proportion as he found them “quite free from the narrow, cramping conventions of their day.” So liberated was he that he came to see the “religionist” for what he was: “a swallower of romance or a masquerader looking to profit and preferment.” He came also to see behind “the blatherings of thin-minded, thin-blooded, thin-experienced religionists” only “a brainless theory.” Nor was this the limit of his discoveries. He came further to see that life was not simply a ruthless struggle for material advantages, because, howsoever ruthless and intelligent one’s struggle, still, one might be defrauded by sheer accident. Chance seemed, at times, the final ruler of all things--many of the reporter’s assignments combining “to prove that life is haphazard and casual and cruel; to some lavish, to others niggardly.” Mr. Dreiser, it is fair to say, was the more ready to learn these lessons of experience because, as he plainly tells his readers, he himself was lustful and passionately eager for the material satisfactions of life. He longed to join in the antics of the rich, who alone, as he judged, were bathed in happiness. He felt, as he gazed enviously upon the gilded sons and daughters of earth, that, from no fault of his, life was tragically cheating him. And this sense of grievance, feeding upon itself, passed easily through a sentimental phase into bitterness, as his reminiscences show: “Whenever I returned to any place in which I had once lived and found things changed, as they always were, I was fairly transfixed by the oppressive sense of the evanescence of everything; a mood so hurtful and dark and yet with so rich if sullen a lustre that I was left wordless with pain. I was all but crucified at realising how unimportant I was, how nothing stayed but all changed.... Life was so brief, ... and so soon, whatever its miserable amount or character, it would be gone.... But I, poor waif, with no definite or arresting skill of any kind, not even that of commerce, must go fumbling about looking in upon life from the outside, as it were. Beautiful women, or so I argued, were drawn to any but me.... I should never have a fraction of the means to do as I wished or to share in the life that I most craved. I was an Ishmael.”