Gano was unconsciously making of himself an obscure example of the fact that a man's temperament will find him out upon the removal of the artificial ballast. This removal so seldom takes place that the vaguest notions abound as to any given person's specific gravity. We go through life unconsciously floated, balanced, by family, by inherited friends, inherited pursuits, inherited opinions, inherited money--by a thousand conditions not made by ourselves, but found ready-made to our hands, an expression of other people's energy, supporting or neutralizing our own. Gano's inclinations, not being volcanic or epoch-making, had been, up to the time of the break with his grandfather, dutifully filtered through environing circumstance. Even so, Mr. Tallmadge had had occasion to condemn his grandson's "queer tastes," his "visionary notions," his girlish compassion for suffering, his hypersensitiveness to blame, his even greater shrinking from hurting the feelings of others. The tough old New Englander's contempt for "sensitiveness" had at least done Ethan the service of giving him an exterior self-control, which seemed so far to deny the feelings it only masked, that he was able to pass comfortably in the crowd as a person more impassive, if anything, than the majority. But as soon as he was left to himself, and followed no longer by critical eyes, his natural bias announced itself. He felt less and less drawn to the insouciant artist life of the town; the happy-go-lucky ways lost their first fresh savor; the suppers, the orgies, the endless comment, quite as eager as any of the work and often more brilliant; the short, merry life of the happy little flies that buzz so busily about the flower-garden of art, and that vanish with the vanishing of day--they all ended by striking some note of discord in him, and making him feel out of place there. "Was he getting too old for this kind of thing?" he asked himself, with modern youth's morbid consciousness of the value certain people set upon one time of life to the exclusion of any other, forgetting that "to travel deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education," and the heart out of enlightened satisfaction as well.