A few years of the fast greedy living in the city, that had
seemed so splendid to the Iowa boy and to the men and women who had lived
in his town, and then a woman had died lonely and in want in that Iowa
town, and half across the continent a fat blustering old man had shot
himself in a New York hotel, and here he sat.
Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer's wife, he walked across the
room to the ticket window and standing there watched the people with
definite destinations in mind come up, lay down money, and taking their
tickets go briskly away. He had no fear of being known. Although his name
and his picture had been upon the front pages of Chicago newspapers for
years, he felt so great a change within himself from just the resolution
he had taken that he had no doubt of passing unnoticed.
A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room filled with its
strangely assorted clusters of men and women a sense of the great toiling
masses of people, the labourers, the small merchants, the skilled
mechanics, came over him.
"These are the Americans," he began telling himself, "these people with
children beside them and with hard daily work to be done, and many of them
with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not Morrison and
I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and wealth, who make
up the armies in times of war and raise up boys and girls to do the work
of the world in their turn.
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