have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by
surgical operations. In the mean time, our people are living, on the
whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called
civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just
such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now
speaking.

When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were
unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of
calm acquiescence: acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure
the justice of it,--they really did not care for their neighbors; why
should their neighbors care for them? secondly, a diminished familiarity
of intercourse would have to him great compensations. There were few
people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not
jar upon his nerves. On the whole, he would be better content alone; and
if his mother could only have a little more independence of nature, more
resource within herself, "The less we see of them, the better," said
Stephen, proudly.

He had yet to learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most
scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of
loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible;
and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man
who thus shuts himself apart because he thinks of his fellows with pitying
condescension as his inferiors, is a fool and a blasphemer,--a fool,
because he robs himself of that good-fellowship which is the leaven of
life; a blasphemer, because he virtually implies that God made men unfit
for him to associate with. Stephen White had this lesson yet to learn.

The practical inconvenience of being unpopular, however, he began to feel