This is indifference rather than consideration, selfishness rather than generosity; it is an unsuspected root of much of our national failure, is responsible for much of our national disgrace.

Some day there will come a time when it will have crystallized into a national apathy, which will perhaps cure itself, or have to be cured, as indurations in the body are, by sharp crises or by surgical operations.

In the mean time, our people are living, on the whole, the dullest lives that are lived in the world, by the so-called civilized; and the climax of this dulness of life is to be found in just such a small New England town as Penfield, the one of which we are now speaking.
When it gradually became clear to Stephen that he and his mother were unpopular people, his first feeling was one of resentment, his second of calm acquiescence: acquiescence, first, because he recognized in a measure the justice of it,--they really did not care for their neighbors; why should their neighbors care for them?
secondly, a diminished familiarity of intercourse would have to him great compensations.

There were few people in the town, whose clothes, whose speech, whose behavior, did not jar upon his nerves.

On the whole, he would be better content alone; and if his mother could only have a little more independence of nature, more resource within herself, "The less we see of them, the better," said Stephen, proudly.
He had yet to learn the lesson which, sooner or later, the proudest, most scornful, most self-centred of human souls must learn, or must die of loneliness for the want of learning, that humanity is one and indivisible; and the man who shuts himself apart from his fellows, above all, the man who thus shuts himself apart because he thinks of his fellows with pitying condescension as his inferiors, is a fool and a blasphemer,--a fool, because he robs himself of that good-fellowship which is the leaven of life; a blasphemer, because he virtually implies that God made men unfit for him to associate with.