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hadn’t ought to act thataway. What you care what folks think? We-uns up in the mountains don’t give a damn about they-uns down in the valley.” Self-parody was Joe’s misfortune; he was a buffoon even with his soul. A sad Jewish comedian, grey-haired, grey-eyed, grey-skinned, sick, intelligent, unsure, he lacked audience-sense to an almost fatal degree. He used a dozen masks, accents, patters, soft-shoe steps, to parry an invisible laughterwhose source he could not locate; in the confusion of these disguises, he had lost himself. The go-getting business man, the official greeter, the barber-shop harmonist, the Scout leader, the comic Englishman, Ikey the Jew, all these stereotypes were Joe’s repertory, but they were also Joe. He had made himself grotesque for fear of becoming ridiculous, and though somewhere within him there was a voice crying in the wilderness, it spoke in a babble of tongues, in the base dialect of the Philistines. He was a prophet without honor to himself.
    “He is the antithesis of everything we stand for,” shouted Macdougal Macdermott, the editor of a libertarian magazine, the night Joe’s name was proposed to the Utopian council. “My God, aren’t we going to have any standards? I don’t hold his business against him; he may be a decent employer; but, my God, the man is uncivilized. Don’t you believe in anything ? This fellow is a yahoo.” Ordinarily a generous-minded man, ready to oppose sectarianism whenever he observed it in others, Macdougal Macdermott felt the proposed admission of Joe Lockman as a personal affront. Of all the enrolled Utopians, he was closest to Joe by temperament. Tall, red-bearded, gregarious, susceptible to a liver complaint, puritanical, disputatious, hard-working, monogamous, a good father and a good friend, he had suffered all his life from a vague sense that he was somehow crass, that he did not belong by natural endowment to that world of the spirit which his intellect told him was the highest habitationof man. That he could not see this world was a source of perpetual grievance to him; he knew that it existed through perceiving its effect on others, as a man in a snug house infers that the wind is blowing from the agitation of the leaves on the trees. Had he not seen a poem, he would have scoffed at the idea of poetry, and had the idea of poetry not been presented to him, he would have scoffed at a poem. Nevertheless, ten years before, he had made the leap into faith and sacrificed $20,000 a year and a secure career as a paid journalist for the intangible values that eluded his empirical grasp. He had moved down town into Bohemia, painted his walls indigo, dropped the use of capital letters and the practice of wearing a vest, and, having thus impressed his Sancho Panza into the service of quixotic causes, he now felt it to be the keenest ingratitude that he should be asked to admit into the fellowship a man who had done nothing . A whole habit of thrift in him cried out against the proposed largesse. Where was the justice in the world, if the savings of a lifetime were to be wiped out in a sudden inflation of the currency? Like the Prodigal Son’s brother, he rebelled against this capriciousness of favor; his logical character cried out against the illogic of grace.
    In the heat of the discussion that followed, two tendencies crystallized, the strict and the latitudinarian, and the strict would have won the day had not Mac himself, in one of those reversals of feeling characteristic of amateur parliaments, suddenly shifted ground. The ease with which his arguments were prevailingawoke him to question their validity; the novelty of winning a point put his dormant conscience on guard. He had been carried to the center of opinion more rapidly than he had anticipated, and the very smoothness of the voyage made him distrust the current of passion that had swept him there. The elation of his supporters disgusted him and invoked a sympathy for Joe which