“I had put the thought aside, and had taken up this other, you see. Between myself and the young athlete I had created in fancy a relation that would never attempt to come to any sort of physical expression. We would live, I dreamed, each his own life, each gathering what beauty might be possible from the great outer world and bringing it as a prize to the other. There would be this man I loved and of whom I asked nothing and toward whom my whole impulse would be forever just to give and give to the very top of my bent.

“You understand how it was, or rather of course you do not understand now but some day it may be you will,” said the voice coming from the thin lips of the small fat man walking up and down the room behind me in the house in Ohio. “I did a foolish thing,” said the voice. “One day I wrote a note to the man telling something of the dream that had been in my mind and as I had nothing else to send I went to a florist’s and sent him a great bunch of beautiful roses.”

“I got no answer to the note but later he showed it about and all during the rest of my days at the school—and out of a kind of blind determination I stayed on there until I graduated and had got my degree, my expenses after my father’s death being paid by my cousin—during all the rest of my days at the school I was looked upon generally as a—perhaps you do not even know the meaning of the word—I was looked upon as a pervert.

“There was another and more vulgar word, a word I had seen on the walls of the shed and on the board fence when I was a schoolboy that was also shouted at me. Like my father before me I, in my trouble, took to walking in the streets and in lonely places at night. The word would be shouted at me from the darkness or from the steps of a house as I stumbled along in the darkness and I had not then, as I had when I was a lad, the satisfaction of thinking of myself as another Francisco, as one who could resort to poison powders to assert his own supremacy and to reëstablish himself with himself.

“I was simply determined I would finish my days in college and would not follow my father’s footsteps in taking my own life—having then and always having had a queer sort of respect, do you see, for life as it manifested itself in my own body—that I would finish my days in that place and that I would then, at the first opportunity, get hold of enough money to make myself respected among the men with whom and in whose company I would in all likelihood have to live out my days.

“I conceived, do you see, of money-making as the only sure method to win respect from the men of the modern world and as for you, my lad, if you have sensibilities as I suppose you have or I should not have taken the trouble to invite you to my house—as for you, my lad, if an opportunity comes to you, as it did to me when my cousin got me sent South, you had better take advantage of it,” said the judge, coming from behind my chair and standing before me to pour himself another glass of the whisky which he drank this time I noticed without the customary little ceremony of holding it for a moment between his eyes and the light.

I thought, or I may fancy I then thought, that the judge’s bright birdlike eyes were clouded and looked tired as he said these last words and that his hands as he poured the whisky trembled a little but perhaps the notion but springs from my more mature fancy playing over a dramatic moment in life.

And at any rate he came to loaf away the next afternoon at the stable and was as he always had been, sitting in silence, listening to the talk that went round and folding his fat little hands over his neatly-waistcoated paunch. And when he spoke he, as always, concealed under so thick a coat of good-natured toleration what sarcasm may have lurked in his words that he won and seemed always to hold the respect of all of his hearers.

NOTE III

DEFINITION