Presently his critical faculty flooded back again—­almost for the first time since his arrest.  And he knew instinctively that he was standing again on surer ground.  He began to wonder, for instance, just what the commonwealth was doing for these human derelicts which it shed such facile tears over...  He knew, of course, what it had done in his case.  It had given him three indifferent meals, vaccinated him, put him through a few stereotyped quizzes to assure itself that he was neither insane nor criminal, and finally moved him on to a less trying but an equally vacuous existence.  He used to wonder just what tortures the others had endured during that week of probation in Ward 1, which, in nearly every case, so far as he could learn, included the experience of the bull pen.  For, after all, these other men were physically shaken from excess—­weak, spent, tremulous.  He had been through mental tortures, but, at least, his body and soul had had some fitness for the strain upon him.  How close did the winds of madness come to snapping clean these empty reeds ... how many were broken utterly?  He asked Monet.

“Lots of them go under,” Felix Monet had returned.  “I think I came very near it myself...  I remember that first night I spent alone in Ward One...  I’d been three weeks without a drop of anything to drink.  Cut off, suddenly, like that!” He made a swift gesture.  “And all at once I found myself in a madhouse.  I actually knocked my head against the wall that night...  And, in the morning, came the bull pen...  They knew I wasn’t insane.  My record—­everything—­proved that! ...  When I protested, their excuse was that everyone was equal here ... there were no favorites. ...  More lies in the name of equality!  The thing doesn’t exist—­it never has existed.  Nothing is equal, and trying to make it so produces hell.  They’re always trying to level ... level.  They want to strip you of everything but your flock mind.  Ah yes, timid sheep make easy herding!”

For the first time Fred Starratt saw Monet quivering with unleashed conviction, and he glimpsed the hidden turbulence of spirit which churned under the placid surface.

“After a while,” Monet went on, “when I got almost to the snapping point, they sent me to Ward Six.  You know how it is—­like a clear, cold plunge ... it wakes you up...  There’s a method in it all.  They know that after a week in hell you find even purgatory desirable.”

“And yet, once you got away, you traveled the same road that had brought you here in the first place...  Was the game worth the candle?”

“It was an escape while it lasted, even though it did lead me to prison again...  But isn’t that where escape always leads?  The world is a good deal like Fairview—­a rule-ridden institution on a larger scale...  We escape for a time in our work, in our play, in our loves, but the tether’s pretty short. ...  And finally, one day, death swings the door open and we go farther afield.”