point, that it was good and necessary to marry one woman and cleave to her until death?  He did not know.  It was not for him to bother about the subtleties of evolution, which even then was being noised abroad, or to ferret out the curiosities of history in connection with this matter.  He had no time.  Suffice it that the vagaries of temperament and conditions with which he came into immediate contact proved to him that there was great dissatisfaction with that idea.  People did not cleave to each other until death; and in thousands of cases where they did, they did not want to.  Quickness of mind, subtlety of idea, fortuitousness of opportunity, made it possible for some people to right their matrimonial and social infelicities; whereas for others, because of dullness of wit, thickness of comprehension, poverty, and lack of charm, there was no escape from the slough of their despond.  They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to shuffle off this mortal coil—­which under other circumstances had such glittering possibilities—­via the rope, the knife, the bullet, or the cup of poison.

“I would die, too,” he thought to himself, one day, reading of a man who, confined by disease and poverty, had lived for twelve years alone in a back bedroom attended by an old and probably decrepit housekeeper.  A darning-needle forced into his heart had ended his earthly woes.  “To the devil with such a life!  Why twelve years?  Why not at the end of the second or third?”

Again, it was so very evident, in so many ways, that force was the answer—­great mental and physical force.  Why, these giants of commerce and money could do as they pleased in this life, and did.  He had already had ample local evidence of it in more than one direction.  Worse—­the little guardians of so-called law and morality, the newspapers, the preachers, the police, and the public moralists generally, so loud in their denunciation of evil in humble places, were cowards all when it came to corruption in high ones.  They did not dare to utter a feeble squeak until some giant had accidentally fallen and they could do so without danger to themselves.  Then, O Heavens, the palaver!  What beatings of tom-toms!  What mouthings of pharisaical moralities—­platitudes!  Run now, good people, for you may see clearly how evil is dealt with in high places!  It made him smile.  Such hypocrisy!  Such cant!  Still, so the world was organized, and it was not for him to set it right.  Let it wag as it would.  The thing for him to do was to get rich and hold his own—­to build up a seeming of virtue and dignity which would pass muster for the genuine thing.  Force would do that.  Quickness of wit.  And he had these.  “I satisfy myself,” was his motto; and it might well have been emblazoned upon any coat of arms which he could have contrived to set forth his claim to intellectual and social nobility.