the lower ranks to the highest places before they reached middle
life. It was no longer a land where merit strove with merit, and the
prize fell to the most earnest and the most gifted. The tremendous
influx of foreign population since the war of the Rebellion and the
right of franchise given unreservedly to the illiterate and the
vicious rendered the ambitious American youth now a toy in the hands
of aliens, and position a thing to be bought at the price set by un-
American masses.

Thoughts like these had more and more with each year filled the mind
of Preston Cheney, until, like the falling of stones and earth into a
river bed, they changed the naturally direct current of his impulses
into another channel. Why not further his life purpose by an
ambitious marriage? The first time the thought entered his mind he
had cast it out as something unclean and unworthy of his manhood.
Marriage was a holy estate, he said to himself, a sacrament to be
entered into with reverence, and sanctified by love. He must love
the woman who was to be the companion of his life, the mother of his
children.

Then he looked about among his early friends who had married, as
nearly all the young men of the middle classes in America do marry,
for love, or what they believed to be love. There was Tom Somers--a
splendid lad, full of life, hope and ambition when he married Carrie
Towne, the prettiest girl in Vandalia. Well, what was he now, after
seven years? A broken-spirited man, with a sickly, complaining wife
and a brood of ill-clad children. Harry Walters, the most infatuated
lover he had ever seen, was divorced after five years of discordant
marriage.