friends out of the most unlikely material. Some of the most
radical of these were in the habit of gathering informally in his
rooms about once a week. Sometimes the talk was good and pungent.
Much of it was merely wild.

His college friend, Sam Miller, now assistant city librarian, was
one of this little circle. Another was Oscar Marchant, a fragile
little Socialist poet upon whom consumption had laid its grip. He
was not much of a poet, but there burnt in him a passion for
humanity that disease and poverty could not extinguish.

One night James Farnum dropped in to borrow some money from his
cousin and for ten minutes listened to such talk as he had never
heard before. His mind moved among a group of orthodox and
accepted ideas. A new one he always viewed as if it were a
dynamite bomb timed to go off shortly. He was not only suspicious
of it; he was afraid of it.

James was, it happened, in evening dress. He took gingerly the
chair his cousin offered him between the hectic Marchant and a
little Polish Jew.

The air was blue with the smoke from cheap tobacco. More than one
of those present carried the marks of poverty. But the note of the
assembly was a cheerful at-homeness. James wondered what the devil
his cousin meant by giving this heterogeneous gathering the
freedom of his rooms.

Dickinson, the single-taxer, was talking bitterly. He was a big
man with a voice like a foghorn. His idea of emphasis appeared to