His nerve centres of judgment and will have not been
employed in solving the problems of life, but in maintaining his own
solvency by the insolvency of others. He trades upon sorrow and
draws a livelihood from misfortune. He transmutes tears into
treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs himself in clean linen
and develops the round of his belly. He is a bloodsucker and a
vampire. He lays unholy hands on heaven and hell at cent. per cent.,
and his very existence is a sacrilege and a blasphemy. And yet here
am I, wilting before him, an arrant coward, with no respect for him
and less for myself. Why should this shame be? Let me rouse in my
strength and smite him, and, by so doing, wipe clean one offensive
page.
But no. As I said, he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, and
in it was the aristocrat's undisguised contempt for the canaille.
Behind him was the solid phalanx of a bourgeois society. Law and
order upheld him, while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge.
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