see him after midnight, bounding along a campus path, with goat-cries beneath the moon. His suits went baggy, his shirts and drawers got dirty, his shoes wore through—he stuffed them with cardboard strips—his hats grew shapeless and wore through at the creases. But he did not mean to go unkempt—the thought of going for repairs filled him with weary horror. He hated to act—he wanted to brood upon his entrails for fourteen hours a day. At length, goaded, he would lash his great bulk, lulled in the powerful inertia of its visions, into a cursing and violent movement.
He was desperately afraid of people in crowds: at class meetings, or smokers, or at any public gathering, he was nervous and constrained until he began to talk to them, and got them under him. He was always afraid that some one would make a joke about him, and that he would be laughed at. But he was not afraid of any man alone: he felt that he could handle any one if he got him away from his crowd. Remembering his savage fear and hatred of the crowd, with a man alone he could play cruelly, like a cat, snarling gently at him, prowling in on him softly, keeping cocked and silent the terrible tiger’s paw of his spirit. All of their starch oozed out of them; they seemed to squeak and twitter, and look round for the door. He would get some loud pompous yokel—the student president of the Y. M. C. A., or the class president—and bear down on him with evil gentle matter-of-factness.
“Don’t you think,” he would begin with earnest piety, “don’t you think that a man should kiss his wife on her belly?”
And he would fasten all the eager innocence of his face into a stare.
“For, after all, the belly is sometimes more beautiful than the mouth, and far cleaner. Or do you believe in the belly-less marriage? I, for one,” he went on with proud passion, “do not! I stand for more and better Belly-Kissing. Our wives, our mothers, and our sisters expect it of us. It is an act of reverence to the seat of life. Nay! it is even an act of religious worship. If we could get our prominent business men and all the other right— thinking people interested in it, it would bring about the mightiest revolution ever known in a nation’s life. In five years it
