The worst moment in the life of a man who has always proudly regarded himself as above any need whatever from his fellow men is when he discovers all in a flash, that the timid animal he spurned as it fawned has him upon his back, has its teeth and claws at his helpless throat.

For four months he stood out against the isolation, the suspicion as to his sanity, the patronizing pity of men who but a little while before had felt honored when he spoke to them.  For four months he gave battle to unseen and silent foes compassing him on every side.  He had no spirit for the fight; his love of Dorothy Hallowell and his complete rout there had taken the spirit out of him—­and with it had gone that confidence in himself and in his luck which had won him so many critical battles.  Then—­He had been keeping up a large suite of offices, a staff of clerks and stenographers and all the paraphernalia of the great and successful lawyer.  He had been spreading out the little business he got in a not unsuccessful effort to make it appear big and growing.  He now gave up these offices and the costly pride, pomp and circumstance—­left with several thousand dollars owing.  He took two small rooms in a building tenanted by beginners and cheap shysters.  He continued to live at his club, where even the servants were subtly insolent to him; he could see the time approaching when he might have to let himself be dropped for failing to pay dues and bills.

He stared at his ruin in stupid and dazed amazement.  Usually, to hear or to read about such a catastrophe as this is to get a vague, rather impressive notion of something picturesque and romantic.  Ruined, like all the big fateful words, has a dignified sound.  But the historians and novelists and poets and other keepers of human records have a pleasant, but not very honest way, of omitting practically all the essentials from their records and substituting glittering imaginings that delight the reader—­and wofully mislead him as to the truth about life.  What wonder that we learn slowly—­and improve slowly.  How wofully we have been, and are, misled by all upon whom we have relied as teachers.

Already one of these charming tales of majestic downfall was in process of manufacture, with Frederick Norman as the central figure.  It was only awaiting his suicide or some other mode of complete submergence for its final glose of glamor.  In this manufacture, the truth, as usual, had been almost omitted; such truth as was retained for this artistic version of a human happening was so perverted that it was falser than the simon pure fictions with which it was interwoven.  Just as the literal truth about his success was far from being altogether to his credit, so the literal truth as to his fall gave him little of the vesture of the hero, and that little ill fitting, to cover his naked humanness.  Let him who has risen to material success altogether by methods approved by the idealists, let him who has fallen from on high with graceful majesty, without hysterical clutchings and desperate attempts at self-salvation in disregard of the safety of others—­let either of these superhuman beings come forward with the first stone for Norman.