"Insanity is a queer thing," he went on, still brooding into the light. "There's more of it about than we're apt to think. It works in so many ways. In hobbies, arts, philosophies. Music is a kind of insanity. I know. I've got mine penned up in the music now, and I think I can keep it there now, and save my soul."
"Yours?"
"Yes, mine. I know now—now that it's safe for me to know. I was down at that village by the beach a year or so ago. I'm a Kain, of course, one of the crazy Kains, after all. John Sanderson was born in the village and lived there till his death. Only once that folks could remember had he been away, and that was when he took some papers to the city for Mrs. Kain to sign. He was caretaker at the old 'Kain place' the last ten years of his life, and deaf, they said, since his tenth year—'deaf as a post.' And they told me something else. They said there was a story that before my father, Daniel, married her, my mother had been an actress. An actress! You'll understand that I needed no one to tell me that!
"They told me that they had heard a story that she was a great actress. Dear God, if they could only know! When I think of that night and that setting, that scene! It killed her, and it got me over the wall—"
THEY GRIND EXCEEDING SMALL
By BEN AMES WILLIAMS
From Saturday Evening Post
I telephoned down the hill to Hazen Kinch. "Hazen," I asked, "are you going to town to-day?"
"Yes, yes," he said abruptly in his quick, harsh fashion. "Of course I'm going to town."
"I've a matter of business," I suggested.