The Tracer of Lost Persons

Excerpt-"I don't want to be pleasant: I want to jar you. Don't I care enough about you to breakfast with you? Then I've a right to be pleasantly unpleasant. I can't bear to watch your mental and spiritual dissolution--a man like you, with all your latent ability and capacity for being nobody in particular--which is the sort of man this nation needs. Do you want to turn into a club-window gazer like Van Bronk? Do you want to become another Courtlandt Allerton and go rocking down the avenue--a grimacing, tailor-made sepulcher?--the pompous obsequies of a dead intellect?--a funeral on two wavering legs, carrying the corpse of all that should be deathless in a man? Why, Jack, I'd rather see you in bankruptcy--I'd rather see you trying to lead a double life in a single flat on seven dollars and a half a week--I'd almost rather see you every day at breakfast than have it come to that!