he had never known men. He had thought of men in the mass, and despised
them because of their multitudinous duplication, and their typical
weaknesses; but he had never known one man or one woman from the subtler,
surer divination of the heart. His intellect had made servants and lures
of his emotions and his heart, for even his every case in court had been
won by easy and selfish command of all those feelings in mankind which
make possible personal understanding.

In this little back parlour it came to him with sudden force how, long
ago, he had cut himself off from any claim upon his fellows--not only by
his conduct, but by his merciless inhuman intelligence working upon the
merciful human life about him. He never remembered to have had any real
feeling till on that day with Kathleen--the day he died. The bitter
complaint of a woman he had wronged cruelly, by having married her, had
wrung from him his own first wail of life, in the one cry "Kathleen!"

As he sat eating his simple meal his pulses were beating painfully.
Every nerve in his body seemed to pluck at the angry flesh. There
flashed across his mind in sympathetic sensation a picture. It was the
axe-factory on the river, before which he used to stand as a boy, and
watch the men naked to the waist, with huge hairy arms and streaming
faces, toiling in the red glare, the trip-hammers endlessly pounding upon
the glowing metal. In old days it had suggested pictures of gods and
demi-gods toiling in the workshops of the primeval world. So the whole
machinery of being seemed to be toiling in the light of an awakened
conscience, to the making of a man. It seemed to him that all his life
was being crowded into these hours. His past was here--its posing, its
folly, its pitiful uselessness, and its shame. Kathleen and Billy were
here, with all the problems that involved them. Rosalie was here, with
the great, the last problem.