le to blockade his mind to any
speculations as concerned his future usefulness by raising up a perfect
barricade of past memories, and then by sitting down on top of the
barricade and gloating because it was a little higher than that upbuilt
by the next man.

Moreover, when those purely personal interests failed him, if purely
personal interests did ever fail a man, he had only to summon Ramsdell
and set him to reading aloud to him. To be sure, Ramsdell had a trick
of chopping up his sentences into separate words, as the primary-school
child spells its words by separate letters. Still, if it destroyed
somewhat of the sense, it at least increased the interest, since only
the most profound attention could discover the pith of any paragraph,
when every syllable in that paragraph was uttered with the same
deliberate stress.

And then there was his father. To Opdyke's certain knowledge, the good
professor curtailed by hours and hours and hours his more congenial
occupations for the sake of helping his son to work out the chess
problems in which they both were taking a perfunctory delight. Reed did
unfeignedly enjoy his father's company; but that was no reason he
should reduce him to a captivity akin to his own. How long had it
lasted, anyhow? May, June--nine months. And, in all that time, Olive
never had missed, until to-day.

Opdyke made a wry face at the darkness. So he had come back to that,
after all the fuss. What a kid he was, despite his six-feet three, and
the time he had gone under the knife, unwincing, but fully conscious,
because his heart was weak just then and the doctors were afraid of
anaesthetics! Afterwards, when the affair was safely over, they had said
things about his pluck. And now here he was, bewailing his fate because
Olive had, just the once, failed to put in her appearance for her daily
call. Pluck be hanged! And Olive had been wonderfully loyal, all these
months. Knowing her popularity abroad and her busy life at home, he
could not fail to be aware, when he stopped to think about it, that she
must have given up any amount of pleasanter engagements, for the simple
sake of coming to see him.

What made her do it, anyway? Liking? Conscience?

Opdyke gritted his teeth. One accepts liking with all due gratitude,
however far it may be removed from any sentiment. It is a wholly
different thing to feel one's self the object of a conscientious
visitation. In the latter case, one longs to throw a whisk