It was sheerly automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living present.

Just as Ruth's face, in a momentary jealousy had called before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new memory-visions rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the screen of his consciousness.

These visions came out of the actions and sensations of the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday and last week--a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever thronged his mind.
So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell's easy flow of speech--the conversation of a clever, cultured man--that Martin kept seeing himself down all his past.

He saw himself when he had been quite the hoodlum, wearing a "stiff-rim" Stetson hat and a square-cut, double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police permitted.

He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to palliate it.