Chapter VII

CHAPTER VII

A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met
Ruth Morse, and still he dared not call. Time and again he nerved
himself up to call, but under the doubts that assailed him his
determination died away. He did not know the proper time to call,
nor was there any one to tell him, and he was afraid of committing
himself to an irretrievable blunder. Having shaken himself free
from his old companions and old ways of life, and having no new
companions, nothing remained for him but to read, and the long
hours he devoted to it would have ruined a dozen pairs of ordinary
eyes. But his eyes were strong, and they were backed by a body
superbly strong. Furthermore, his mind was fallow. It had lain
fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the books was
concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing. It had never been jaded
by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp
teeth that would not let go.

It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived
centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook. But he was
baffled by lack of preparation. He attempted to read books that
required years of preliminary specialization. One day he would
read a book of antiquated philosophy, and the next day one that was
ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the conflict
and contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the economists.
On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam
Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew
that the ideas of another were obsolete. He was bewildered, and
yet he wanted to know. He had become interested, in a day, in
economics, industry, and politics. Passing through the City Hall
Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of which were
half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly
carrying on a discussion. He joined the listeners, and heard a
new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the people.
One was a tramp, another was a labor agitator, a third was a law-
school student, and the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen.
For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single
tax, and learned that there were warring social philosophies. He
heard hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging
to fields of thought that his meagre reading had never touched
upon. Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely,
and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such
strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter
who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old
man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that WHAT
IS IS RIGHT, and