What would they think--those three hundred speech-tired boys--if
some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and
lay bare his own life--its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its
crimes--and tell them there was weakness and there was strength in
every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to
overcome one's weakness with one's strength.

The idea took strange hold on him. It seemed the method of the
world--at any rate it had been the method of that afternoon--for the
men who stood before their fellows with clean hands to plant
themselves on the far side of a chasm of conventions, or narrow
self-esteem, or easily won virtue, and cry to those beings who
struggled on the other side of that chasm--to those human beings
whose souls had never gone to school: "Look at us! Our hands are
clean, our hearts are pure. See how beautiful it is to be good! Come
ye, poor sinners, and be good also." And the poor sinners, the
untaught, birthmarked human souls, would look over at the
self-acclaimed goodness they could see far across the chasm, and
even though attracted to it (which, he grimly reflected, would not
seem likely) the thing that was left with them was a sense of the
width of the chasm.

He had a sense of needless waste, of unnecessary blight. He looked
down at those three hundred faces and it was as if looking at human
waste; and it was human stupidity, human complacency and cowardice
kept those human beings human drift.

With what a smug self-satisfaction--under the mask of
benevolence--the speakers of that afternoon had flaunted their
virtue--their position! How condescendingly they had spoken of the