Maurice Kirkwood is a remarkable and exceptional
one, and it is hardly probable that any reader's experience will furnish
him with its parallel. But let him look back over all his acquaintances,
if he has reached middle life, and see if he cannot recall more than one
who, for some reason or other, shunned the society of young women, as
if they had a deadly fear of their company. If he remembers any such, he
can understand the simple statements and natural reflections which are
laid before him.

One of the most singular facts connected with the history of Maurice
Kirkwood was the philosophical equanimity with which he submitted to the
fate which had fallen upon him. He did not choose to be pumped by the
Interviewer, who would show him up in the sensational columns of his
prying newspaper. He lived chiefly by himself, as the easiest mode of
avoiding those meetings to which he would be exposed in almost every
society into which he might venture. But he had learned to look upon
himself very much as he would upon an intimate not himself,--upon a
different personality. A young man will naturally enough be ashamed
of his shyness. It is something which others believe, and perhaps he
himself thinks, he might overcome. But in the case of Maurice Kirkwood
there was no room for doubt as to the reality and gravity of the long
enduring effects of his first convulsive terror. He had accepted the
fact as he would have accepted the calamity of losing his sight or his
hearing. When he was questioned by the experts to whom his case was
submitted, he told them all that he knew about it almost without a sign
of emotion. Nature was so peremptory with him,--saying in language that
had no double meaning: "If you violate the condition on which you
hold my gift of existence I slay you on the spot,"--that he became as
decisive in his obedience as she was in her command, and accepted his
fate without repining.

Yet it must not be thought for a moment,--it cannot be supposed,--that
he was insensible because he looked upon himself with the coolness of an
enforced philosophy. He bore his burden manfully, hard as it was to
live under it, for he lived, as we have seen, in hope. The thought of
throwing it off with his life, as too grievous to be borne, was familiar
to his lonely hours, but he rejected it as unworthy of his manhood. How
he had speculated and dreamed about it is plain enough from the paper
the reader may remember on Ocean, River, and Lak