He held his head down and looked ashamed.  Some of the women cast glances of pity toward him from time to time in a furtive and half afraid way, and some of the youngest of the men plainly had compassion on the young fellow—­a compassion exhibited in their faces but not in any more active or compromising way.  But the great majority of the people present showed entire indifference to the youth and his sorrows.  Marsh sat with his head down, but one could catch the malicious gleam of his eyes through his shaggy brows.  He was watching that young fellow with evident relish.  He had not neglected him through carelessness, and apparently the table understood that fact.  The spectacle was making Mrs. Marsh very uncomfortable.  She had the look of one who hopes against hope that the impossible may happen.  But as the impossible did not happen, she finally ventured to speak up and remind her husband that Nat Brady hadn’t been helped to the Irish stew.

Marsh lifted his head and gasped out with mock courtliness, “Oh, he hasn’t, hasn’t he?  What a pity that is.  I don’t know how I came to overlook him.  Ah, he must pardon me.  You must indeed Mr—­er—­Baxter—­ Barker, you must pardon me.  I—­er—­my attention was directed to some other matter, I don’t know what.  The thing that grieves me mainly is, that it happens every meal now.  But you must try to overlook these little things, Mr. Bunker, these little neglects on my part.  They’re always likely to happen with me in any case, and they are especially likely to happen where a person has—­er—­well, where a person is, say, about three weeks in arrears for his board.  You get my meaning?—­you get my idea?  Here is your Irish stew, and—­er—­it gives me the greatest pleasure to send it to you, and I hope that you will enjoy the charity as much as I enjoy conferring it.”

A blush rose in Brady’s white cheeks and flowed slowly backward to his ears and upward toward his forehead, but he said nothing and began to eat his food under the embarrassment of a general silence and the sense that all eyes were fastened upon him.  Barrow whispered to Tracy: 

“The old man’s been waiting for that.  He wouldn’t have missed that chance for anything.”

“It’s a brutal business,” said Tracy.  Then he said to himself, purposing to set the thought down in his diary later: 

“Well, here in this very house is a republic where all are free and equal, if men are free and equal anywhere in the earth, therefore I have arrived at the place I started to find, and I am a man among men, and on the strictest equality possible to men, no doubt.  Yet here on the threshold I find an inequality.  There are people at this table who are looked up to for some reason or another, and here is a poor devil of a boy who is looked down upon, treated with indifference, and shamed by humiliations, when he has committed no crime but that common one of being poor.  Equality ought to make men noble-minded.  In fact I had supposed it did do that.”