This, then, had been his unconscious life plan, his unvoiced fate.  Thus had he sketched it hazily, as a teller of tales sketches the plot of a story, such and such a sum being the total of all the characters and circumstances.  But as he had gone on developing it, suddenly a new character had appeared to change the final figures—­a wrench thrown into the wheel of continuity ... a wrench that bore the name of Axel Hilmer...  He felt no bitterness now for the man.  Had he ever felt it?

Axel Hilmer had long ceased to be a living personality to Fred Starratt.  Instead, he had taken on almost the significance of a strange divinity ... an eternal questioner.  At their very first meeting he had started the ferment in Fred Starratt’s soul with the directness of his interrogations.  He was not a man who declared his own faiths ... he merely asked you to prove yours.  The questions he had asked Fred Starratt on that first night had been insignificant in themselves.  Why was it ridiculous for a butcher to want an eight-hour day?  Why should one have the firm’s interest at heart?  And yet the sparks from such verbal flint stones had kindled a revolt that had wrecked Fred Starratt’s complacence.

One’s sight becomes strengthened to destructive ideas by gradual perception.  And ideas of any kind are destructive flashed on consciousness unawares.  Fred had thought at first that Hilmer had but opened his eyes to things standing in his range of vision, when, as a matter of fact, Hilmer had merely loaned him his spectacles.  Everything he had seen from that first moment had been through Hilmer’s medium.  A wise man would have proceeded slowly, building himself up for the struggle.  But Fred Starratt had had all the wistful enthusiasm of a fool seeking to achieve power overnight.  Yes, only a fool could have been ashamed of his heritage.  And when Hilmer had placed him calmly in the ranks of the middle class the wine of content had turned suddenly sour.  A year ago his efforts were being directed at escape from so contemptuous a characterization; to-night he was content to acknowledge the impeachment and find a pride in the circumstance.  And, as he sat there shivering in the gloom of Storch’s cracked lamp, he had a vision of this scorned company to which he unquestionably belonged, sterile and barren in the glare of accepted standards, broken gradually by the plowshare of disillusionment and harrowed to great potentialities by a deeper sense of their faiths and needs.  Yes, he had a conviction that what could take place in one soul could take place in the soul of the mass ... he had not changed his standards so much as he had proved them.  The shape and color and perfume of love and loyalty and faith had not been altered for him, but he could discover their blossoming among the shadowy places.