ests remained, and the larger caravansary
was scheduled to close in another day or two, the residue population to
be transferred to "The Breakers."

The day was piping hot but magnificent; corridor, piazza, colonnade, and
garden were empty of life, except for a listless negro servant dawdling
here and there. Virginia managed to find a wheel-chair under the
colonnade and a fat black boy at the control to propel it; and with her
letter hidden in her glove, and her heart racing, she seated herself,
parasol tilted, chin in the air, and the chair rolled noiselessly away
through the dazzling sunshine of the gardens.

On the beach some barelegged children were wading in the surf's bubbling
ebb, hunting for king-crabs; an old black mammy, wearing apron and
scarlet turban, sat luxuriously in the burning sand watching her
thin-legged charges, and cooking the "misery" out of her aged bones.
Virginia could see nobody else, except a distant swimmer beyond the
raft, capped with a scarlet kerchief. This was not solitude, but it must
do.

So she dismissed her chair-boy and strolled out under the pier. And, as
nobody was there to interrupt her she sat down in the sand and opened
her letter with fingers that seemed absurdly helpless and unsteady.

"On the train near Jupiter Light," it was headed; and presently
continued:

"I am trying to be unselfishly honest with you to see how it
feels. First--about my loving anybody. I never have; I have on
several occasions been prepared to bestow heart and hand--been
capable of doing it--and something happened every time. On one of
these receptive occasions the thing that happened put me
permanently out of business. I'll tell you about that later.

"What I want to say is that the reason I don't love you is not
because I can't, but because I won't! You don't understand that.
Let me try to explain. I've always had the capacity for really
loving some woman. I was more or less lonely and shy as a child
and had few playmates--very few girls of my age. I adored those I
knew--but--well, I was not considered to be a very desirable
playmate by those parents who knew the Malcourt history.

"One family was nice to me--some of them. I usually cared a great
deal for anybody who was nice to me.

"The point of all this biography is that I'm usually somewhat
absurdly touched by the friendship of an attractive woman of my
own sort--or, rather, of the so