of the histories of its saints.

He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here on
earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our
homes, in the street,--everywhere when we came to think of it? It was
really the part of shallowness to ignore those extrahuman relations and
account for the unforeseen by attributing to fate the more than
inexplicable. Did not a chance encounter often decide the entire life of
a man? What was love, what the other incomprehensible shaping
influences? And, knottiest enigma of all, what was money?

There one found oneself confronted by primordial organic law, atrocious
edicts promulgated at the very beginning of the world and applied ever
since.

The rules were precise and invariable. Money attracted money,
accumulating always in the same places, going by preference to the
scoundrelly and the mediocre. When, by an inscrutable exception, it
heaped up in the coffers of a rich man who was not a miser nor a
murderer, it stood idle, incapable of resolving itself into a force for
good, however charitable the hands which fain would administer it. One
would say it was angry at having got into the wrong box and avenged
itself by going into voluntary paralysis when possessed by one who was
neither a sharper nor an ass.

It acted still more strangely when by some extraordinary chance it
strayed into the home of a poor man. Immediately it defiled the clean,
debauched the chaste, and, acting simultaneously on the body and the
soul, it insinuated into its possessor a base selfishness, an ignoble
pride; it suggested that he spend for himself alone; it made the humble