But the long day and the “real dirt” of the night before were telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what had made him angry when he read it on the car.

“What is the matter?” Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he was making to contain himself.

“There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its prophet,” Judge Blount was saying at that moment.

Martin turned upon him.

“A cheap judgment,” he remarked quietly. “I heard it first in the City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better. I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it nauseates me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear that great and noble man’s name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a cesspool. You are disgusting.”

It was like a thunderbolt. Judge Blount glared at him with apoplectic countenance, and silence reigned. Mr. Morse was secretly pleased. He could see that his daughter was shocked. It was what he wanted to do — to bring out the innate ruffianism of this man he did not like.

Ruth’s hand sought Martin’s beseechingly under the table, but his blood was up. He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and fraud of those who sat in the high places. A Superior Court Judge! It was only several years before that he had looked up from the mire at such glorious entities and deemed them gods.

Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter understood was for the benefit of the ladies. Even this added to his anger. Was there no honesty in the world?

“You can’t discuss Spencer with me,” he cried. “You do not know any more about Spencer than do his own countrymen. But it is no fault of yours, I grant. It is just a phase of the contemptible ignorance of the times. I ran across a sample of it on my way here this evening. I was reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer. You should read it. It is accessible to all men. You can buy it in any book-store or draw it from the public library. You would feel ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance of that noble man compared with what Saleeby has collected on the subject. It is a record of shame that would shame your shame.”

“’The philosopher of the half-educated,’ he was called by an academic Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere he breathed. I don’t think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but there have been critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who have read no more than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his followers to adduce one single idea from all his writings — from Herbert Spencer’s writings, the man who has impressed the stamp of his genius over the whole field of scientific research and modern thought; the father of psychology; the man who revolutionized pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French peasant is taught the three R’s according to principles laid down by him. And the little gnats of men sting his memory when they get their very bread and butter from the technical application of his ideas. What little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to him. It is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent.”

“And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford — a man who sits in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount — has said that Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker. Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them! ‘“First Principles” is not wholly destitute of a certain literary power,’ said one of them. And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker. Yappers and blatherskites! Yappers and blatherskites!”

Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence. Everybody in Ruth’s family looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement, and they were horrified at Martin’s outbreak. The remainder of the