"Please don't say such things.... Can't you understand how much I want you to be sincere to me? Lately, I don't know why, I've seemed to feel so isolated. When you talk that way I feel more so. I—just want—a friend."
There was a silence; then he said lightly:
"I've felt that way myself. The more friends I make the more solitary I seem to be. Some people are fashioned for a self-imprisonment from which they can't break out, and through which no one can penetrate. But I never thought of you as one of those."
"I seem to be at times—not exactly isolated, but unable to get close to—to Kathleen, for example. Do you know, Duane, it might be very good for me to have you to talk to."
"People usually like to talk to me. I've noticed it. But the curious part of it is that they have nothing to give me in exchange for my attention."
"What do you mean?"
He laughed. "Oh, nothing. I amuse people; I know it. You—and everybody—say I am all cleverness and froth—not to be taken seriously. But did it ever occur to you that what you see in me you evoke. Shallowness provokes shallowness, levity, lightness, inconsequence—all are answered by their own echo.... And you and the others think it is I who answer."
He laughed, not looking at her:
"And it happens that you—and the others—are mistaken. If I appear to be what you say I am, it is merely a form of self-defence. Do you think I could endure the empty nonsense of a New York winter if I did not present to it a surface like a sounding-board and let Folly converse with its own echo—while, behind it, underneath it, Duane Mallett goes about his own business."
Astonished, not clearly understanding, she listened in absolute silence. Never in all her life had she heard him speak in such a manner. She could not make out whether bitterness lay under his light and easy speech, whether a maliciously perverse humour lurked there, whether it was some new mockery.