CHAPTER XVI.
THE REALLY UGLY DUCKLING.
He turned, to the woman across the table: "All right; I will stay." I am but telling the story of a man of whose life from this time for two years I know but little.

He was always reticent about these years, yet always said he had no occasion to regret them.

With the life's outlines, though, with what it really was, aside from details, I became, in a degree, familiar.
What does the average person in one class know of the life in another?
There are "classes," certainly, with great bars between them here, though this is a republic, and all men and women are supposed to be free and equal and alike in most things.

There are lower and wider grades of existence, such that the story of them may never be told save in patch-work or by inference, yet which have as full a history, and where there are loves and hates and hopes and despairs as deep as are ever felt in the mass where the creed-teachers and Mrs.Grundy and the legislatures are greater factors.
And of this more reckless, hopeless people Harlson learned much.

With them he was; of them he could never fully be.