me not what you happen to be,
but what you are. I've got the impression that you are something, that
there's a real 'you' in your inside. But you don't let me see it. You
send a polite servant to the door when I knock. Probably this sounds
very weird and un-English to you. But to my mind it is much more weird
to behave as you are behaving. Come out, can't you. Let's look at you."

It was exactly that--that brusque, unsentimental appeal--that Michael
needed. He saw himself at that moment, as Falbe saw him, a shelled and
muffled figure, intangible and withdrawn, but observing, as it were,
through eye-holes, and giving nothing in exchange for what he saw.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's quite true what you tell me. I'm like that.
But it really has never struck me that anybody cared to know."

Falbe ceased digging his excavation in the pine-needles and looked up on
Michael.

"Good Lord, man!" he said; "people care if you'll only allow them to.
The indifference of other people is a false term for the secretiveness
of oneself. How can they care, unless you let them know what there is to
care for?"

"But I'm completely uninteresting," said Michael.

"Yes; I'll judge of that," said Falbe.

Slowly, and with diffident pauses, Michael began to speak of himself,
feeling at first as if he was undressing in public. But as he went on
he became conscious of the welcome that his story received, though that
welcome only expressed itself in perfectly unemotional monosyllables. He
might be undressing, but he was undressing in front of a fire. He knew
that he uncovered himself to no icy blast or contemptuous rain, as he
had felt when, so few days before, he had spoken of himself and what
he was to his father. There was here the common land of music to build
upon, whereas to Lord Ashbridge that same soil had been, so to speak,
the territory of the enemy. And even more than that, there was the
instinct, the certain conviction that he was telling his tale to
sympathetic ears, to which the mere fact that he was speaking of himself
presupposed a friendly hearing. Falbe, he felt, wanted to know about
him, regardless of the nature of his confessions. Had he said that he
was an undetected kleptomaniac, Falbe would have liked to know, have
been pleased at any tidings, provided only they were authentic. This
seemed to reveal itself to him even as he spoke; it had been there
waiting for him to claim it, lying there as in a poste restante, only