“You labored with him in good, old Puritan-dominie fashion?” said Bromley, with a crooked smile. “You know mighty well I didn’t; though that would have been the sensible thing to do. He has an obscene twist in his brain, but for all that, I have no reason to believe that he hasn’t some decent limitations. If I had told him who the Dabneys are, and that they are friends of mine, that would have settled it. Instead of doing that, I went crazy mad--knocked him down and beat him--made a shouting ass of myself.” Bromley laughed and thrust a hand across the reading table. “Shake--you old fighting Roundhead!” he said. “Now I know you are all human! Is that what you were looking so glum about? You needn’t lose any sleep over such a little gust of righteous indignation as that. As a matter of fact, you ought to sleep the better for it.” “Wait,” said Philip soberly. “It isn’t the mere fact that Middleton got what he was asking for; it is the other and bigger fact that I am no longer my own man, Harry. The frantic gold chase we have been through has done something to me; I don’t know what it is; but I do know I am not the man I was when I left New Hampshire a little more than eighteen months ago. I’m hag-ridden--possessed of a dumb devil. Every now and then I am made to realize that there are hellish possibilities in me that I never even dreamed of before I came out here.” Bromley grew philosophical. “The possibilities, hellish or otherwise, active or dormant, lie in every man of us born of woman, Philip. If we are, at bottom, creatures of heredity, on the surface we are pretty strictly creatures of environment; by which I mean that the environment calls to the surface only those qualities in us that are in harmony with it--that will respond to it. Back home, I take it, you had your little commonplace round and lived in it. Out here, all the traditional strings are off, and we are free to revert to type, if we feel like it.” “M-m,” said Philip, thin-lipped; “very pretty--in theory. But it doesn’t get me anywhere. You can’t argue from the general to the particular; not in my case, anyway.” There was the wisdom of the wise fools of all the ages in Bromley’s smile. “Of course; you want to be specialized. We all do. I’ve prophesied for you before, and I can do it again if you want me to. You are of the tribe of those who have to emerge through great tribulation. There is a strong man and a broad man inside of you, Philip, and some day he will break out and come to his own. When he does, there will probably be a great smashing of window-panes and a kicking-out of door panels--wreckage a-plenty--and after it is all over you will doubtless wonder why there had to be an earthquake in your particular case. But the fact will remain.” Philip grunted. “Are you trying to tell me that I am hidebound?”