with his head carried rigidly erect, in a crowd whose every individual
almost overtopped his stunted stature. It was vain to pretend to himself
that he was not disappointed. But that was mere feeling; the stoicism of
his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next
time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be
delivered-something really startling--a blow fit to open the first crack
in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions
sheltering the atrocious injustice of society. Of humble origin, and
with an appearance really so mean as to stand in the way of his
considerable natural abilities, his imagination had been fired early by
the tales of men rising from the depths of poverty to positions of
authority and affluence. The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his
thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions, had
set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the
medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth--by sheer weight of merit alone. On
that view he considered himself entitled to undisputed success. His
father, a delicate dark enthusiast with a sloping forehead, had been an
itinerant and rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect--a
man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness. In the
son, individualist by temperament, once the science of colleges had
replaced thoroughly the faith of conventicles, this moral attitude
translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition. He nursed it
as something secularly holy. To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the
true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and
blasphemous. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is
prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's
indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin
of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy
public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic
fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an