As I looked at him and at the men who came to visit him a kind of wonder grew within me. The man Marvin Manno, a slender man, rather elegantly clad and with gold-rimmed glasses on his large nose, was talking. He was connected, in an official capacity, with some large commercial establishment of the city, an establishment that sold goods to the Berners store, but he did not come to the town on business. Why had he come? He spoke continually of his own schemes and hopes and balanced oddly back and forth between devotion to the business interests he served and a kind of penchant he had for writing poetry. An odd effect was produced. The man was sincerely devoted to two interests in life that could not by any chance be combined and as one listened to his talk one became more and more puzzled. Only Alonzo Berners was not puzzled. He entered into the man’s thoughts, understood him, gave him what he apparently wanted, sympathetic understanding without sentimentality. We sat in the garden back of the Berners house, the man Manno talked, a doctor came and spoke of his patients, and in particular of an old woman lying in a cabin down by the river, who for two years had been on the point of death but who could not die. Then the judge spoke of his father and of political affairs in the state, the elder Berners boasted of the speed of the stallion Peter Point and the boy with the large teeth smiled shyly but remained silent. Then when evening came and they had all gone away I looked at Alonzo Berners and wondered. In all the talk no mention was ever made of himself or his own affairs. Even the pain always present in his body had been forgotten by the others. Any mention of his suffering would have seemed out of place. My own mind was groping about in a new medium for the expression of a life. I was very young then, had not yet come to the age of citizenship, but for a long time I had been building within myself my own consciousness of men. Well, they were a kind of thing, selfish and self-centred, and they were right in being so. One played the game, won if he could and tried not to be a bellyacher if he lost. In me was a kind of contempt for men including myself that Alonzo Berners did not have. Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it? Was he right and I wrong or was he a sentimentalist? My mind had run into a thicket of new ideas and I could not find my way out. “Tread softly,” I said to myself.