“You people are crazy, though,” he said genially. “You’re never going to get anywhere in America with that proletariat stuff. Every workingman wants to live the way I do. He doesn’t want me to live the way he does. You people go at it from the wrong end. I remember a Socialist organizer came down fifteen years ago into Southern Illinois. I was in the coal business then, working for my first girl’s father. This Socialist was a nice fellow….”

His voice was dreamy again, but there was an undercurrent of excitement in it. It was as if he were reviving some buried love affair, or, rather, some wispy young tendresse that had never come to anything. The Socialist organizer had been a distant connection of his first girl’s, the two men had met and had some talks; later the Socialist had been run out of town; the man had stood aloof, neither helping nor hindering.