"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"
"I never let her know, really, how different I was."
"You kept it to yourself?"
"It was the only way to keep it."
"Your genius?"
"If you choose to call it that."
"The thing," she said, "that made you different."
"You see," he said, "they didn't understand that that was where I was most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."
"You couldn't lose it."
"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in Bombay; and it went again."