to that work, and so be sooner done with it.  Money, or place, or even power, was nothing but means to him:  other men valued them because of their influence on others.  As his work in the world was only the development of himself, it was different, of course.  What would it matter to his soul the day after death, if millions called his name aloud in blame or praise?  Would he hear or answer then?  What would it matter to him then, if he had starved with them or ruled over them?  People talked of benevolence.  What would it matter to him then, the misery or happiness of those yet working in this paltry life of ours?  In so far as the exercise of kindly emotions or self-denial developed the higher part of his nature, it was to be commended; as for its effect on others, that he had nothing to do with.  He practised self-denial constantly to strengthen the benevolent instincts.  That very morning he had given his last dollar to Joe Byers, a half-starved cripple.  “Chucked it at me,” Joe said, “like as he’d give a bone to a dog, and be damned to him!  Who thanks him?” To tell the truth, you will find no fairer exponent than this Stephen Holmes of the great idea of American sociology,—­that the object of life is to grow.  Circumstances had forced it on him, partly.  Sitting now in his room, where he was counting the cost of becoming a merchant prince, he could look back to the time of a boyhood passed in the depths of ignorance and vice.  He knew what this Self within him was; he knew how it had forced him to grope his way up, to give this hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom and knowledge.  All men around him were doing the same,—­thrusting and jostling and struggling, up, up.  It was the American motto, Go ahead; mothers taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of glittering prizes.  He at least saw the higher meaning of the truth; he had no low ambitions.  To lift this self up into a higher range of being when it had done with the uses of this,—­that was his work.  Self-salvation, self-elevation,—­the ideas that give birth to, and destroy half of our Christianity, half of our philanthropy!  Sometimes sleeping instincts in the man struggled up to assert a divinity more terrible than this growing self-existent soul that he purified and analyzed day by day:  a depth of tender pity for outer pain; a fierce longing for rest, on something, in something, he cared not what.  He stifled such rebellious promptings,—­called them morbid.  He called it morbid, too, the passion now that chilled his strong blood, and wrung out these clammy drops on his forehead, at the mere thought of this girl below.

He shut the door of his room tightly:  he had no time to-day for lounging visitors.

For Holmes, quiet and steady, was sought for, if not popular, even in the free-and-easy West; one of those men who are unwillingly masters among men.  Just and mild, always; with a peculiar gift that made men talk their best thoughts to him, knowing they would be understood; if any core of eternal flint lay under the simple, truthful manner of the man, nobody saw it.