"Do you know,
Layton, I sometimes feel that I have missed a great deal in life--and yet
not at all what everybody thought I would miss, the stir of active life or
the vulgar excitement of being in love. All that kind of thing seems as
distasteful to me now as ever."

There he stopped and poked the fire until the young professor, overcome
with sympathetic curiosity, urged him to go on. He sighed at this, and
said: "Why, fortune ought not to have made me an only child, although I
can't say that I've ever longed for brothers or sisters.... But now I feel
that I should like very much to have some nephews and nieces. I never
could have stood having children of my own--I should have been crushed
under the responsibility; but a nephew, now--a young creature with a brain
and soul developing--to whom I could be a help ... I find as I get older
that I have an empty feeling as the college year draws to a close. I have
kept myself so remote from human life, for fear of being dragged into that
feverish center of it which has always so repelled me, that now I do not
touch it at all." He ended with a gentle resignation, taking off his
glasses and rubbing them sadly: "I suppose I do not deserve anything more,
because I was not willing to bear the burdens of common life ... and yet
it almost seems that there should be some place for such as I--?"

The heart of his young friend had melted within him at this revelation of
the submissive isolation of the sweet-tempered, cool-blooded old scholar.
Carelessly confident, like all the young, that any amount or variety of
human affection could be his for the asking, he promised himself to make
the dear old recluse a sharer in his own wealth; but the next year he
married a handsome, ambitious girl who made him accept an advantageous
offer in the commercial world. With his disappearance, the solitary door
in the prison walls which kept J.M. remote from his fellows swung shut.

He looked so hopelessly dull and becalmed after this that the president
was moved to force on him a little outing. Stopping one day with his
touring-car at the door of the library, he fairly swept the sedentary
little man off his feet and out to the machine. J.M. did not catch his
breath during the swift flight to the president's summer home in a trim,
green, elm-shaded village in the Berkshires. When he recovered a little he
was startled by the resemblance of the place to his old recollections of
Woodville. There were the