anybody would want me. Portlaw pays me more than I'm worth as a
Harvard post-graduate. And if that is an asset it's my only one."

Hamil, surprised at his bitterness, looked at him with troubled eyes.
Then his eyes wandered to Shiela, who had now taken up her embroidery.

"I can't help it," said Malcourt impatiently; "I like cities and people.
I always liked people. I never had enough of people. I never had any
society as a boy; and, Hamil, you can't imagine how I longed for it. It
would have been well for me to have had it. There was never any in my
own home; there was never anything in my home life but painful memories
of domestic trouble and financial stress. I was for a while asked to the
homes of schoolmates, but could offer no hospitality in return.
Sensitiveness and humiliation have strained the better qualities out of
me. I've been bruised dry."

He leaned on his elbows, hands clasped, looking out into the sunlight
where myriads of brilliant butterflies were fluttering over the carpet
of white phlox.

"Hamil," he said, "whatever is harsh, aggressive, cynical, mean,
sneering, selfish in me has been externally acquired. You scrape even a
spineless mollusc too long with a pin, and the irritation produces a
defensive crust. I began boy-like by being so damned credulous and
impulsive and affectionate and tender-hearted that even my kid sister
laughed at me; and she was only three years older than I. Then followed
that period of social loneliness, the longing for the companionship of
boys and girls--girls particularly, in spite of agonies of shyness and
the awakening terrors of shame when the domestic troubles ended in an
earthquake which gave me to my father and Helen to my mother, and a
scandal to the newspapers.... O hell! I'm talking like an autobiography!
Don't go, if you can stand it for a moment longer; I'm never likely to
do it again."

Hamil, silent and uncomfortable, stood stiffly upright, gloved hands
resting on the balustrade behind him. Malcourt continued to stare at the
orange-and-yellow butterflies dancing over the snowy beds of blossoms.

"In college it was the same," he said. "I had few friends--and no home
to return to after--my father-died." He hesitated as though listening.
Whenever he spoke of his father, which was seldom, he seemed to assume
that curious listening attitude; as though the man, dead by his own
hand, could hear him....

"Wayward saw me through. I've paid him back what he spe