hes. The chief of
these was his cynicism, although that cynicism had a cause if not a
reason. With other traits, the same either virtues or vices according to
the occasion and the way they were turned, Richard was sensitive. He was
as thin-skinned as a woman and as greedy of approval. And yet his
sensitiveness, with nerves all on the surface, worked to its own defeat.
It rendered Richard fearful of jar and jolt; with that he turned
brusque, repelled folk, and shrunk away from having them too near.

For a crowning disaster, throughout his years of manhood, Richard had
had nothing to do. He had been idle with no work and no object to work
for. You can suffer from brain famine and from hand famine. You may
starve your brain and your hand with idleness as readily as you starve
your stomach with no food. And Richard's nature, without his knowing,
had pined for lack of work.

There had been other setbacks. Richard lost his mother before he could
remember, and his father when he was twelve. He was an only child, and
his father, as well as his mother, had been an only child. Richard stood
as utterly without a family as did the first man. He grew up with
schoolmasters and tutors, looked after by guardians who, infected of a
fashion, held that the best place to rear an American was Europe. These
maniacs kept Richard abroad for fairly the fifteen years next before he
meets you in these pages. The guardians were honest men; they watched
the dollars of their ward with all the jealous eyes of Argus. His mind
they left to chance-blown influences, all alien; and to teachers,
equally alien, and as equally the selection of chance. And so it came
that Richard grew up and continued without an attachment or a friendship
or a purpose; and with a distrust of men in the gross promoted to
feather-edge. Altogether he should be called as loveless, not to say as,
unlovable, a character as any you might encounter, and search throughout
a summer's day.

Most of all, Richard had been spoiled by an admiration for Democritus,
which Thracian's acquaintance he picked up at school. He saw, or thought
he saw, much in the ease of the Abderite to remind him of his own; and
to imitate him he traveled, professed a chuckling indifference to both
the good and the ill in life, and, heedful to laugh at whatever turned
up, humored himself with the notion that he was a philosopher.
Democritus was Richard's affectation: being only an affectation
Democritus did not