I found in the course of the next three days that when Non was not being the life of the party or the party did not need any more life for a while, and we had gone off by ourselves, he became, like most people who let themselves go, a very serious person.  When he talked about his business, he was even religious.  Not that he had any particular vocabulary for being religious, but there was something about him when he spoke of business—­his own business—­that almost startled me at first.  He always seemed to be regarding his business when he spoke of it as being, for all practical purposes, a kind of little religion by itself.

Now Non is a builder or contractor.

* * * * *

For many years now the best way to make a pessimist or a confirmed infidel out of anybody has been to get him to build a house.  No better arrangement for not believing in more people, and for not believing in more kinds of people at once and for life, has ever been invented probably than building a house.  No man has been educated, or has been really tested in this world, until he has built a house.  I submit this proposition to anybody who has tried it, or to any one who is going to try it.  There is not a single kind or type of man who sooner or later will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter with him, into your house.  The house becomes a kind of miniature model (such as they have in expositions) of what is the matter with people.  You enter the door, you walk inside and brood over them.  Everything you come upon, from the white cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on in the roof, reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what is the matter with them.  It is the new houses that are haunted now.  Any man who is sensitive to houses and to people and who would sit down in his house when it is finished and look about in it seriously, and think of all the people that have been built, in solid wood and stone, into it, would get up softly and steal out of it, out of the front door of it, and never enter that house again.

This is what Non saw.  He saw how people felt about their houses, and how they lived in them helplessly and angrily year after year, and felt hateful about the world.

I gradually drew out of him the way he felt about it.  I found he was not as good as some people are at talking about himself, but the subject was interesting.  He began his career building houses for people, as nearly every one does.  The general idea is that everybody is expected to exact commissions from everybody else, and the owner is expected to pay each man his own commission and then pay all the commissions that each man has charged the other man.  Every house that got built in this way seemed to be a kind of network or conspiracy of not doing as you would be done by.  Non did not see any way out at first, just for one man.  He merely noticed how things were going, and he noticed that nearly every person