One living in the house with McGregor during those first years in the city might have thought his life stupid and commonplace but to him it did not seem so. It was for the miner's son a time of sudden and tremendous growth. Filled with confidence in the strength and quickness of his body he was beginning to have also confidence in the vigour and clearness of his brain. In the warehouse he went about with eyes and ears open, devising in his mind new methods of moving goods, watching the men at work, marking the shirkers, preparing to pounce upon the tall German's place as foreman. The superintendent of the warehouse, not understanding the turn of the talk with McGregor on the sidewalk before the saloon, decided to like him and laughed when they met in the warehouse. The tall German maintained a policy of sullen silence and went to laborious lengths to avoid addressing him. In his room at night McGregor began to read law, reading each page over and over and thinking of what he had read through the next day as he rolled and piled apple barrels in the passages in the warehouse. McGregor had an aptitude and an appetite for facts. He read law as another and gentler nature might have read poetry or old legends. What he read at night he remembered and thought about during the day. He had no dream of the glories of the law. The fact that these rules laid down by men to govern their social organisation were the result of ages of striving toward perfection did not greatly interest him and he only thought of them as weapons with which to attack and defend in the battle of brains he meant presently to fight. His mind gloated in anticipation of the battle. CHAPTER III And then a new element asserted itself in the life of McGregor. One of the hundreds of disintegrating forces that attack strong natures, striving to scatter their force in the back currents of life, attacked him. His big body began to feel with enervating persistency the call of sex. In the house in Wycliff Place McGregor passed as a mystery. By keeping silence he won a reputation for wisdom. The clerks in the hall bedrooms thought him a scientist. The woman from Cairo thought him a theological student. Down the hall a pretty girl with large black eyes who worked in a department store down town dreamed of him at night. When in the evening he banged the door to his room and strode down the hallway going to the night school she sat in a chair by the open door of her room. As he passed she raised her eyes and looked at him boldly. When he returned she was again by the door and again she looked boldly at him. In his room, after the meetings with the black-eyed girl McGregor found difficulty in keeping his mind on the reading. He felt as he had felt with the pale girl on the hillside beyond Coal Creek. With her as with the pale girl he felt the need of defending himself. He began to make it a practice to hurry along past her door.