“I thought you capitalists—” interrupted the other with instant retort.
Jeremy laughed.
“I guess you were an American before you were a Socialist.”
“When I can’t be both I’ll quit being either,” answered the other fiercely.
“I do see!” said the other. “You’re in that same trench with Judge Dana, where it makes no difference who or what a man is so long as he fights on the level and to a finish.”
“I guess I am—comrade!” said Milliken, the Socialist.
CHAPTER XIX
SOMETHING queer happened to young Mr. Jeremy Robson on the night of July 10th. Despite a lumpy sensation in the back of his neck and his habitual effect of being absolutely fagged out by the day’s work, he had gone to bed with the resilient assurance of youth that he would awake refreshed and fit in the morning. Instead, he woke up feeling aged beyond the power of the mind to grasp: a mere crumbling ruin, compared to which the pyramid of Cheops was a parvenu and the Druidic altars of Stonehenge the mushroom growth of a paltry yesterday. Worse than this, there was a dregsy, bitter taste in his soul. It grew and spread; and presently as he lay miserably wondering at it, developed into a gall-and-worm-wood loathing of the circumstanding world’s activities, but particularly of his work, the purposeless, futile, inexorable toil of The Guardian, daily re-galvanized into the appearance of life, but in reality doomed to swift and hopeless dissolution.