success is to the good and kind.  Life is like the pious story in the Sunday-school library; evil is the exception and to practice the simple virtues is to tread with sure step the highway to riches and fame.  This sort of ignorance is taught, is proclaimed, is apparently accepted throughout the world.  Literature and the drama, representing life as it is dreamed by humanity, life as it perhaps may be some day, create an impression which defies the plain daily and hourly mockings of experience.  Because weak and petty offenders are often punished, the universe is pictured as sternly enforcing the criminal codes enacted by priests or lawyers.  But, while all the world half inclines to this agreeable mendacity about life, only in America of all civilization is the mendacity accepted as gospel, and suspicion about it frowned upon as the heresy of cynicism.  So the Galloways prosper and are in high moral repute.  Some day we shall learn that a social system which is merely a slavish copy of Nature’s barbarous and wasteful sway of the survival of the toughest could be and ought to be improved upon by the intelligence of the human race.  Some day we shall put Nature in its proper place as kindergarten teacher, and drop it from godship and erect enlightened human understanding instead.  But that is a long way off.  Meanwhile the Galloways will reign, and will assure us that they won their success by the Decalogue and the Golden Rule—­and will be believed by all who seek to assure for themselves in advance almost certain failure at material success in the arena of action.

But they will not be believed by men of ambition, pushing resolutely for power and wealth.  So Frederick Norman knew precisely what he was facing when Galloway’s tall gaunt figure and face of the bird of prey appeared before him.  Galloway had triumphed and was triumphing not through obedience to the Sunday sermons and the silly novels, poems, plays, and the nonsense chattered by the obscure multitudes whom the mighty few exploit, but through obedience to the conditions imposed by our social system.  If he raised wages a little, it was in order that he might have excuse for raising prices a great deal.  If he gave away millions, it was for his fame, and usually to quiet the scandal over some particularly wicked wholesale robbery.  No, Galloway was not a witness to the might of altruistic virtue as a means to triumph.  Charity and all the other forms of chicanery by which the many are defrauded and fooled by the few—­those “virtues” he understood and practiced.  But justice—­humanity’s ages-long dream that at last seems to glitter as a hope in the horizon of the future—­justice—­not legal justice, nor moral justice, but human justice—­that idea would have seemed to him ridiculous, Utopian, something for the women and the children and the socialists.

Norman understood Galloway, and Galloway understood Norman.  Galloway, with an old man’s garrulity and a confirmed moral poseur’s eagerness about appearances, began to unfold his virtuous reasons for the impending break with Burroughs—­the industrial and financial war out of which he expected to come doubly rich and all but supreme.  Midway he stopped.