"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal victory somewhere in a general defeat." "But you really think it selfish," George said. "I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's mental processes, even his dissatisfactions." "You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk. Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they attack." Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated with an unaccustomed passion: "I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that prostrate worship of the fat old god success is as wicked as any other idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are still ashamed of service." "I've served," George said, hotly. "Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the bull's-eye?" Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head. "You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought of service brought me through." Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the other she patted his hair. "What's he scolding my boy for?" George grinned at Bailly. "Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do that?" Bailly nodded thoughtfully. "If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good." XXX To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue, talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in justification that he had walked out of the working class himself. Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound? "I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture. And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait, forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the smaller was the chance of his growing weak.