it, no merit on his part.  He was no different.  All the work he had done was even at that time work performed.  Mr. and Mrs. Morse had condemned him for an idler and a shirk and through Ruth had urged that he take a clerk’s position in an office.  Furthermore, they had been aware of his work performed.  Manuscript after manuscript of his had been turned over to them by Ruth.  They had read them.  It was the very same work that had put his name in all the papers, and, it was his name being in all the papers that led them to invite him.

One thing was certain:  the Morses had not cared to have him for himself or for his work.  Therefore they could not want him now for himself or for his work, but for the fame that was his, because he was somebody amongst men, and—­why not?—­because he had a hundred thousand dollars or so.  That was the way bourgeois society valued a man, and who was he to expect it otherwise?  But he was proud.  He disdained such valuation.  He desired to be valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all, was an expression of himself.  That was the way Lizzie valued him.  The work, with her, did not even count.  She valued him, himself.  That was the way Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued him.  That had been proved often enough in the days when he ran with them; it had been proved that Sunday at Shell Mound Park.  His work could go hang.  What they liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart Eden, one of the bunch and a pretty good guy.

Then there was Ruth.  She had liked him for himself, that was indisputable.  And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the bourgeois standard of valuation more.  She had opposed his writing, and principally, it seemed to him, because it did not earn money.  That had been her criticism of his “Love-cycle.”  She, too, had urged him to get a job.  It was true, she refined it to “position,” but it meant the same thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature stuck.  He had read her all that he wrote—­poems, stories, essays—­“Wiki-Wiki,” “The Shame of the Sun,” everything.  And she had always and consistently urged him to get a job, to go to work—­good God!—­as if he hadn’t been working, robbing sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.

So the little thing grew bigger.  He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession.  Work performed.  The phrase haunted his brain.  He sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over Higginbotham’s Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain himself from shouting out:-