Yet the horrors which surrounded him seemed to leave him untroubled.  It could not be that he was insensible to ugliness, but he rose above it on the wings of some inner beauty...  Once Fred Starratt would have felt some of the father’s scorn for Felix Monet—­the patronizing scorn most men bring to an estimate of the incomprehensible.  What could one expect of a fiddler?  Yes, he would have felt something worse than scorn—­he would have been moved to tolerance.

The only other man in Ward 1 who was sane was Clancy, the newspaper reporter.  But in the afternoons the knot of rational inmates from the famous Ward 6 herded together and exchanged griefs.  Fred Starratt sat and listened, but he felt apart.  Somehow, most of the stories did not ring quite true.  He never had realized before how eager human beings were to deny all blame.  To hear them one would fancy that the busy world had paused merely to single them out as targets for misfortune.  And the more he listened to their doleful whines the more he turned the searching light of inquiry upon his own case.  In the end, there was something beyond reserve and arrogance in the reply he would make to their direct inquiries: 

“What brought me here? ...  Myself!”

But his attitude singled him out for distrust.  He was incomprehensible to these burden shifters, these men who had been trained to cast their load upon the nearest object and, failing everything else, upon the Lord...  They were all either drug users or victims of drink.  And, to a man, they were furiously in favor of prohibition with all the strength of their weak, dog-in-the-manger souls.  Like every human being, they hated what they abused.  They wanted to play the game of life with failure eliminated, and the god that they fashioned was a venerable old man who had the skill to worst them, but who genially let them walk away with victory.

As Fred Starratt listened day after day to their chatter he withdrew more and more from any mental contact with them.  And yet there were times when he felt a longing to pour out his grief into the ears of understanding...  He knew that Monet was waiting for his story, but pride still held him in its grip...  After all, there was a ridiculous side to his plight.  When a man permitted himself to be blindfolded he could not quarrel at being pushed and shoved and buffeted...  How absurd he must have seemed to Watson on that day when he had announced so dramatically: 

“I said I’d stand by Mrs. Starratt’s decision.  And I’m a man of my word!”

How much a man would endure simply for the sake of making a fine flourish!  He had thought himself heroic at that moment, poor, empty fool that he was, when he really had been the victim of cowardice.  A brave man would have cried: 

“I said I’d stand by Mrs. Starratt’s decision, but I’m not quite an idiot!”