e had no time--no time even for a dog!

Better it would assuredly be to have some one to fall back on: it was
not good for a man to stand so alone. Did troubles come, they would
strike doubly hard because of it; then was the time to rejoice in a
warm, human handclasp. And moodily pondering the reasons for his
solitariness, he was once more inclined to lay a share of the blame on
the conditions of the life. The population of the place was still in a
state of flux: he and a mere handful of others would soon, he believed,
be the oldest residents in Ballarat. People came and went, tried their
luck, failed, and flitted off again, much as in the early days. What
was the use of troubling to become better acquainted with a person,
when, just as you began really to know him, he was up and away? At
home, in the old country, a man as often as not died in the place where
he was born; and the slow, eventless years, spent shoulder to shoulder,
automatically brought about a kind of intimacy. But this was only a
surface reason: there was another that went deeper. He had no talent
for friendship, and he knew it; indeed, he would even invert the thing,
and say bluntly that his nature had a twist in it which directly
hindered friendship; and this, though there came moments when he
longed, as your popular mortal never did, for close companionship.
Sometimes he felt like a hungry man looking on at a banquet, of which
no one invited him to partake, because he had already given it to be
understood that he would decline. But such lapses were few. On nine
days out of ten, he did not feel the need of either making or receiving
confidences; he shrank rather, with a peculiar shy dread, from personal
unbosomings. Some imp housed in him--some wayward, wilful, mocking
Irish devil--bidding him hold back, remain cool, dry-eyed, in face of
others' joys and pains. Hence the break with Purdy was a real calamity.
The associations of some five-and-twenty years were bound up in it;
measured by it, one's marriage seemed a thing of yesterday. And even
more than the friend, he would miss the friendship and all it stood
for: this solid base of joint experience; this past of common memories
into which one could dip as into a well; this handle of "Do you
remember?" which opened the door to such a wealth of anecdote. From now
on, the better part of his life would be a closed book to any but
himself; there were allusions, jests without number, homely turns of
speech