As for Andrew, the next morning he put on his best clothes and went by trolley-cars to the next manufacturing town, not a city like Rowe, but a busy little place with two large factories, and tried in vain to get a job there.  As he came home on the crowded car, his face was so despairing that the people looked curiously at him.  Andrew had always been mild and peaceable, but at that moment anarchistic principles began to ferment in him.  When a portly man, swelling ostentatiously with broadcloth and fine linen, wearing a silk hat, and carrying a gold-headed cane like a wand of office, got into the car, Andrew looked at him with a sidelong glance which was almost murderous.  The spiritual bomb, which is in all our souls for our fellow-men, began to swell towards explosion.  This man was the proprietor of one of the great factories in Leavitt, the town where Andrew had vainly sought a job.  He had been in the office when Andrew entered, and the latter had heard his low voice of instruction to the foreman that the man was too old.  The manufacturer, who weighed heavily, and described a vast curve of opulence from silk hat to his patent-leathers, sat opposite, his gold-headed cane planted in the aisle, his countenance a blank of complacent power.  Andrew felt that he hated him.

The man’s face was not intellectual, not as intellectual as Andrew’s.  He gave the impression of the force of matter oncoming and irresistible, some inertia which had started Heaven knew how.  This man had inherited great wealth, as Andrew knew.  He had capital with which to begin, and he had strength to roll the accumulating ball.  Andrew felt more and more how he hated this man.  He had told his foreman that Andrew was too old, and Andrew knew that he was no older, if as old, as the man himself.

“If I had been born under the Czar, and done with it, I should have felt differently,” he told himself.  “But who is this man?  What right has he to say that his fellow-men shall or shall not?  Does even his own property give him the right of dictation over others?  What is property?  Is it anything but a temporary lease while he draws the breath of life?  What of it in the tomb, to which he shall surely come?  Shall a temporary possession give a man the right to wield eternal power?  For the power of giving or withholding the means of life may produce eternal results.”

When the man rose and moved down the car, oscillating heavily, steadying himself with his gold-headed cane, and got out in front of a portentous mansion, Andrew would scarcely have recognized the look in his own eyes had he seen himself in a mirror.

“That chap is pretty well fixed,” said a man next him, to one on the other side.

“A cool half-million,” replied the other.

“More than that,” said the first speaker.  “His father left him half a million to start with, besides the business, and he’s been piling up ever since.”

“Do you work there?”