Nothing is more certain than that the inhibitions are dependent, more often than not, upon purely extraneous circumstances: environment, the mental attitude of the moment, even such trivial influences as the cut of one’s clothes and the obligations imposed thereby. Clad in a flannel shirt, baggy trousers and miner’s boots, Philip had thought nothing of the civilized restraints when he had flung himself, tooth and nail, upon the drunken bully who was menacing Bromley in the bar-room of the Leadville hotel. But now, with the mining-camp rawnesses put safely behind him, the conventional fetterings were not so easily broken. Middleton was a petty libertine, to be sure, but he knew that a few straightforward words of explanation about the Dabney family and his own connection with it would put an end to the ex-tonnage clerk’s pursuit of the daughter. But the cool words were not spoken. In the moment of hesitation the curious inner voice prompted vengefully, “Will you stand for that? Haven’t you found out yet that you are in love with Jean Dabney--the girl to whom this fat rake is offering the bitterest insult a man of his breed can offer to a woman of hers?” and at this flame-hot goading the inhibitory bonds became as smoking flax and he lashed out with a swift, fury-driven uppercut to the smooth-shaven jaw. At the smacking impact of the totally unexpected blow the fat victim gasped, gurgled, tried to duck aside and stumbled and fell on the sidewalk. There were no passers-by to interfere, and for a single instant Philip stood looking down upon his handiwork in a fit of half-awed astonishment. Then the mad vengeance wave submerged him again and he sprang upon the fallen man, beating him futilely and trying to grind his face into the pavement. And at the last: “Get up, you dirty hound!--get up and run if you want to go on living! If you ever so much as look at that girl again, I’ll cut your rotten heart out and feed it to the dogs in the street! Run! you damned----” XIV WHEN Bromley came in at half-past eleven, glowing from his brisk walk in the cool night air from the Demming house in upper Fourteenth Street, he found that Philip had not yet gone to bed; was sitting with his hands locked over a knee and an extinct pipe between his teeth, his face the face of a man frowningly at odds with himself and his world. “Heavens, Phil!” was the play-boy’s greeting, “You look as if you had lost every friend you ever had and never expected to find another. What’s gnawing you now?” “I suppose you would call it nothing,” returned the loser moodily. “I’ve merely been finding out that I can be still another and different kind of a crazy fool.” Bromley grinned. “You have been to the Corinthian again?” “Oh, hell--no! I said a different kind of a fool. Drop it, Harry. I don’t want to talk about it.”