"You see, there's nothing mysterious about it--nor interesting. Just ordinary. I'm living the way I do because I'm not smart enough to think of a better way. But one advantage of it is that I have a good deal of time to think about things. Maybe I'll think of a way to help, later. And, anyway, just to look at me is proof that you don't _have_ to get ground up in the hopper like everybody else or shut the door of the industrial squirrel-cage on yourself in order not to starve. Perhaps that'll give some cleverer person the courage to start out on his own tangent." Lydia drew a long breath at the conclusion of this statement. "Well--" she said, inconclusively; "_well!_" After a pause she advanced, "My sister's husband is in the insurance business." "You see," said the workman, drilling a hole with great rapidity, "you see I ought not to talk to you. I can't without being impolite." Lydia seemed in no haste to assure him that he had not been. She pulled absently a loose lock of hair--a little-girl trick that came back to her in moments of abstraction--and looked down at her feet. When she looked up, it was to say with a bewildered air, "But a man has to earn his living." Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this remark. "A living isn't hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It's earning food for his vanity, or his wife's, that kills the average man. It's coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don't you remember what Emerson says--Melton's always quoting it--'Most of our expense is for conformity to other men's ideas? It's for cake that the average man runs in debt.' He must have everything that anyone else has, whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men's wives are. He must have his children do what everyone else's children do, whether it's bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That's the worst of it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social distinction, and that a man must--if he can get it in no other way--pay his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called success--" Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. "Why, you're talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York--if there is any such thing! The rest of America--why, any European would say we're as primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury's not complicated. Good gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is anybody knows everybody else!"