Having made this reasonable decision, in three days he abruptly changed it — and with that the whole world changed. And why not? For who in the world has ever been more important than Fred Cornplow?

He has, at times, been too noisy or too prosy, he has now and then thought more of money than of virtue and music; but he has been the eternal doer; equally depended upon — and equally hated — by the savage mob and by the insolent nobility.

When Fred Cornplow was an Egyptian, it was he who planned the pyramids, conciliated the mad pharaohs, tried to make existence endurable for the sweating slaves. In the days when he was called a Roman Citizen, he was a centurion and he conquered Syria and ruled his small corner of it with as much justice as the day allowed.

As Fr. Abbot Cornplow, in the bright Dark Ages, he developed agriculture and the use of building stone; later, as a captain under Cromwell, he helped tame the political power of the ecclesiastics. The American Civil War was not fought between General Grant and General Lee, but between Private Fred Cornplow of Massachusetts and Private Ed Cornplow of Alabama; and a few years later it was they who created bribery and railroads and gave all their loot to science.

From Fred Cornplow’s family, between B.C. 1937 and A.D. 1937, there came, despite an occasional aristocratic Byron or an infrequent proletarian John Bunyan, nearly all the medical researchers, the discoverers of better varieties of wheat, the poets, the builders, the singers, the captains of great ships. Sometimes his name has been pronounced Babbitt; sometimes it has been called Ben Franklin; and once, if Eugene O’Neill may be trusted, he went by the style of Marco Polo and brought back from civilized China to barbaric Europe the sound of camel bells, and the silken tents, scented with sandalwood, which have overshadowed the continent ever since.

He is the eternal bourgeois, the bourjoyce, the burgher, the Middle Class, whom the Bolsheviks hate and imitate, whom the English love and deprecate, and who is most of the population worth considering in France and Germany and these United States.

He is Fred Cornplow; and when he changes his mind that crisis is weightier than Waterloo or Thermopylae.

No, Fred decided, he couldn’t either retire or take a year’s vacation. Howard, confound him, was right; just now, he had to stay by the ship. But he certainly wouldn’t drudge on for another ten or fifteen years. He would retire in five years from now, exactly; he had made up his mind, and dogGONE, let anybody try to change it! And meantime he would gorgeously ‘get in shape.’

He felt absurd in doing it, but Fred was in training for adventure. He stopped smoking before breakfast; he occasionally walked to the office; and once or twice a week, with intense distress and a feeling of being silly, he wabbled dumb-bells in the Elks’ gymnasium or joined in the calisthenics of a squad of bankers and brokers and superintendents of schools, worthy gentlemen who as dancers and high kickers resembled a mixed group of turkeys and hippopotami enacting an Andalusian flower song.