Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn’t know what I was talking about.  He hasn’t understood a word of it.  What did he do with his education, anyway?

Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him a grisly monster.  Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.

A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home.  His sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop.  Also, having got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous.  Marian had called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce her engagement, during which visit she had playfully inspected Martin’s palm and told his fortune.  On her next visit she brought Hermann von Schmidt along with her.  Martin did the honors and congratulated both of them in language so easy and graceful as to affect disagreeably the peasant-mind of his sister’s lover.  This bad impression was further heightened by Martin’s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse with which he had commemorated Marian’s previous visit.  It was a bit of society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named “The Palmist.”  He was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his sister’s face.  Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that worthy’s asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen disapproval.  The incident passed over, they made an early departure, and Martin forgot all about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any woman, even of the working class, should not have been flattered and delighted by having poetry written about her.

Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone.  Nor did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for what he had done.

“Why, Marian,” he chided, “you talk as though you were ashamed of your relatives, or of your brother at any rate.”

“And I am, too,” she blurted out.

Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes.  The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.

“But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry about my own sister?”

“He ain’t jealous,” she sobbed.  “He says it was indecent, ob—­obscene.”

Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to resurrect and read a carbon copy of “The Palmist.”

“I can’t see it,” he said finally, proffering the manuscript to her.  “Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene—­that was the word, wasn’t it?”