The socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they struggled to overthrow the society of the present, and out of the material to build the society of the future.  I, too, was a socialist and a revolutionist.  I joined the groups of working-class and intellectual revolutionists, and for the first time came into intellectual living.  Here I found keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met strong and alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members of the working-class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind.

Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing idealism, sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom—­all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit.  Here life was clean, noble, and alive.  Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious; and I was glad to be alive.  I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire.  All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ’s own Grail, the warm human, long-suffering and maltreated, but to be rescued and saved at the last.

And I, poor foolish I, deemed all this to be a mere foretaste of the delights of living I should find higher above me in society.  I had lost many illusions since the day I read “Seaside Library” novels on the California ranch.  I was destined to lose many of the illusions I still retained.

As a brain merchant I was a success.  Society opened its portals to me.  I entered right in on the parlour floor, and my disillusionment proceeded rapidly.  I sat down to dinner with the masters of society, and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society.  The women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down below in the cellar.  “The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were sisters under their skins”—­and gowns.

It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked me.  It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic.  And they were so sentimentally selfish!  They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends stained with