he long nights with nine years of _that_ to look
back on.

"Let my life be a lesson to you teaching you--if nothing else--that it
is of no use to fight society. They have a hopeless advantage, the
contemptible advantage of numbers, and they are not ashamed to use
it.... But my spirit would not let me lie quiet under injury and
insult. I was ever a fighter, born to die with my spurs on. And when I
die at last, they will find that I go with a Parthian shot ... and after
all have the last word.

"So I came out into a bright world again, an old man before my time,
ruined forever, marked with a scarlet mark to wear to my grave....

"And then in time, as of course it would, the resolve came to me to come
straight back here to die. A man wants to die among his own people. They
were all that ever meant anything to me--they have that to boast of....
I loved this city once. To die anywhere else ... why, it was
meaningless, a burlesque on death. I looked at my face in the glass; my
own mother would not have known me. And so I came straight to Jennie
Paynter's, such was my whim ... whom I held on my knee fifty years ago.

"... Oh, it's been funny ... so funny ... to sit at that intolerable
table, and hear poor old Brooke on Reconstruction.

"And I've wondered what little Jennie Paynter would do, if I had risen
on one of these occasions and spoken my name to the table. How I've
hated her--hated the look and sight of her--and all the while embracing
it for dear life. She has told me much that she never knew I listened
to--many a bit about old friends ... forty years since I'd heard their
names. And Brooke has told me much, the doting old ass.

"But the life grew unbearable to a man of my temper. I could afford the
decency of privacy in my old age. For I had worked hard and saved
since....

"And then you came ... a scholar and a gentleman."

It was quite dark in the room. Surface's voice had suddenly changed. The
bitterness faded out of it; it became gentler than Queed had ever heard
it.

"I did not find you out at once. My life had made me unsocial--and out
of the Nazareth of that house I never looked for any good to come. But
when once I took note of you, each day I saw you clearer and truer. I
saw you fighting, and asking no odds--for elbow-room to do your own
work, for your way up on the newspaper, for bodily strength and
health--everywhere I saw you, you were fighting indomitably. I have
always loved a fighter. You wer