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act, and live so much in what, to others, means so little, for is it not all common and to be expected.
     In Julia Dehning all experience had gone to make her wise now in a desire for a master in the art of life, and it came to pass that in Alfred Hersland brought by a cousin to visit at the house she found a man who embodied her ideal in a way to make her heart beat with surprise.
     To a bourgeois mind that has within it a little of the fervor for diversity, there can be nothing more attractive than a strain of singularity that yet keeps well within the limits of conventional respectability a singularity that is, so to speak, well dressed and well set up. This is the nearest approach the middle class young woman can ever hope to make to the indifference and distinction of the really noble. When singularity goes further and so gets to be always stronger, there comes to be in it too much real danger for any middle class young woman to follow it farther. Then comes the danger of being mixed by it so that no one just seeing you can know it, and they will take you for the lowest, those who are simply poor or because they have no other way to do it. Surely no young person with any kind of middle class tradition will ever do so, will ever put themselves in the way of such danger, of getting so that no one can tell by just looking that they are not like them who by their nature are always in an ordinary undistinguished degradation. No! such kind of a danger can never have to a young one of any middle class tradition any kind of an attraction.
     Now singularity that is neither crazy, sporty, faddish, or a fashion, or low class with distinction, such a singularity, I say, we have not made enough of yet so that any other one can really know it, it is as yet an unknown product with us. It takes time to make queer people, and to have others who can know it, time and a certainty of place and means. Custom, passion, and a feel for mother earth are needed to breed vital singularity in any man, and alas, how poor we are in all these three.
     Brother Singulars, we are misplaced in a generation that knows not Joseph. We flee before the disapproval of our cousins, the courageous condescension of our friends who gallantly sometimes agree to walk the streets with us, from all them who never any way can understand why such ways and not the others are so dear to us, we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world accustomed to take all manner of strange forms into its bosom and we leave our noble order to be known under such forms as Alfred Hersland, a poor thing, and even hardly then our own.
     The Herslands were a Western family. David Hersland, the father, had gone out to a Western state to make his money. His wife had been born and brought up in the town of Bridgepoint. Later Mr. Hersland had sent his son Alfred back there to go to college and then to stay on and to study to become a lawyer. Now it was some years later and Alfred Hersland had come again to Bridgepoint, to settle down there to practice law there, and to make for himself his own money.
     The Hersland family had not had their money any longer than the others of this community, but they had taken to culture and to ideas quicker.
     Alfred Hersland was well put together to impress a courageous crude young woman, who had an ambition for both passion and position and who needed too to have a strain of romance with them.
     Hersland was tall and well dressed and sufficiently good-looking, and he carried himself always with a certain easy dignity and grace. His blond hair, which he wore parted in the middle, a way of doing which at that time showed both courage and conviction, covered a well shaped head. His features were strongly marked, regular and attractive, his expression was pleasing, his talk was always interesting, and his manners were dignified and friendly. His eyes and voice meant knowledge, feeling, and a pleasant