“I know he’s a palaverin’ fool’s well’s you do; but I reckon I’ve got some manners o’ my own, ’s well’s he.  When a man bids me a pleasant good-mornin’, I ain’t a-goin’ to take that time to fly out at him, however much I’ve got agin him.”

And Reuben was silenced.  The under-current of ill-feeling against Stephen and his mother went steadily on increasing.  There is a wonderful force in these slow under-currents of feeling, in small communities, for or against individuals.  After they have once become a steady tide, nothing can check their force or turn their direction.  Sometimes they can be traced back to their spring, as a stream can:  one lucky or unlucky word or deed, years ago, made a friend or an enemy of one person, and that person’s influence has divided itself again and again, as brooks part off and divide into countless rivulets, and water whole districts.  But generally one finds it impossible to trace the like or dislike to its beginning.  A stranger, asking the reason of it, is answered in an off-hand way,—­“Oh, everybody’ll tell you the same thing.  There isn’t a soul in the town but hates him;” or, “Well, he’s just the most popular man in the town.  You’ll never hear a word said against him,—­never; not if you were to settle right down here, and live.”

It was months before Stephen realized that there was slowly forming in the town a dislike to him.  He was slow in discovering it, because he had always lived alone; had no intimate friends, not even when he was a boy.  His love of books and his passionate love of beauty combined with his poverty to hedge him about more effectually than miles of desert could have done.  His father and mother had lived upon fairly good terms with all their neighbors, but had formed no very close bonds with any.  In the ordinary New England town, neighborhood never means much:  there is a dismal lack of cohesion to the relations between people.  The community is loosely held together by a few accidental points of contact or common interest.  The individuality of individuals is, by a strange sort of paradox, at once respected and ignored.  This is indifference rather than consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our national disgrace.  Some day there will come a time when it will have crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by surgical operations.  In the mean time, our people are living, on the whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now speaking.