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"A poor man with gumption can still elevate himself out of the mire," said the Senator, "and that will continue to be true a thousand years from now."

"Maybe, maybe," Trout answered gently. "He may even have so much gumption that his descendents will live in a Utopia like Pisquontuit, where, I'm sure, the soul-rot and silliness and torpor and insensitivity are exactly as horrible as anything epidemic in Rosewater County. Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time.

"We must find a cure."

"Your devotion to volunteer fire departments is very sane, too, Eliot, for they are, when the alarm goes off, almost the only examples of enthusiastic unselfishness to be seen in this land. They rush to the rescue of any human being, and count not the cost. The most contemptible man in town, should his contemptible house catch fire, will see his enemies put the fire out. And, as he pokes through the ashes for remains of his contemptible possessions, he will be comforted and pitied by no less than the Fire Chief."

Trout spread his hands. "There we have people treasuring people as people. It's extremely rare. So from this we must learn."

"By God, you're great!" the Senator said to Trout. "You should have been a public relations man! You could make lockjaw sound good for the community! What was a man with your talents doing in a stamp redemption center?"

"Redeeming stamps," Trout mildly replied.

"Mr. Trout," said Eliot, "what happened to your beard?"

"That was the first thing you asked me."

"Tell me again."

"I was hungry and demoralized. A friend knew of a job. So I shaved off my beard and applied. P.S., I got the job."

"I don't suppose they would have hired you with a beard."

"I would have shaved it off, even if they'd said I could keep it."

"Why?"

"Think of the sacrilege of a Jesus figure redeeming stamps."

"I can't get enough of this Trout," the Senator declared.

"Thank you."

"I just wish you'd stop saying you're a socialist. You're not! You're a free-enterpriser!"

"Through no choice of my own, believe me."

Eliot studied the relationship between the two interesting old men. Trout was not offended, as Eliot thought he should have been, by the suggestion that he be an ultimately dishonest man, a press agent. Trout apparently enjoyed the Senator as a vigorous and wholly consistent work of art, was disinclined to dent or tamper with him in any way. And the Senator admired Trout as a rascal who could rationalize anything, not understanding that Trout had never tried to tell anything but the truth.

"What a political platform you could write, Mr. Trout!"

"Thank you."

"Lawyers think this way, too—figuring out wonderful explanations for hopeless messes. But somehow, from them, it never sounds right. From them it always sounds like the 1812 Overture played on a kazoo." He sat back, beamed. "Come on—tell us some of the other wonderful things Eliot was doing down there when he was so full of booze."

"The court," said McAllister, "is certainly going to want to know what Eliot learned from the experiment."

"Keep away from booze, remember who you are, and behave accordingly," the Senator roundly declared. "And don't play God to people, or they will slobber all over you, take you for everything they can get, break commandments just for the fun of being forgiven—and revile you when you are gone."

Eliot couldn't let this pass. "Revile me, do they?"

"Oh hell—they love you, they hate you, they cry about you, they laugh at you, they make up new lies about you every day. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off, just as though you really were God, and one day walked out."

Eliot felt his soul cringe, knew he could never stand to return to Rosewater County again.

"It seems to me," said Trout, "that the main lesson Eliot learned is that people can use all the uncritical love they can get."

"This is news?" the Senator raucously inquired.

"It's news that a man was able to give that kind of love over