I stood looking at him and then, like a flash, the figure of the man seen that afternoon in the restaurant came into my mind--the furtive fellow who had been a thief, had been sent to prison and who, after he was freed, did not know what to do with himself. What I mean is that my mind again did a thing it is always doing. It leaped away from the man sitting before me, confused him with the figures of other men. After I had left Edward I had walked about thinking my own thoughts. Shall I be able to explain what happened at that moment? In one instant I was thinking of the man now sitting before me and who had wanted to pay me this visit, of the ex-thief seen in the restaurant, of myself and my friend Edward, and of the old workman who used to come and stand at the kitchen door to talk with mother when I was a boy. Thoughts went through my mind like voices talking. “Something within a man is betrayed. There is but the shell of a man walking about. What a man wants is to be able to justify himself to himself. What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well--to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it--to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?” IV What I am trying to convey to you, the reader, is a sense of the man in the bedroom, and myself looking at each other and thinking each his own thoughts and that these thoughts were a compound of our own and other people’s thoughts too. In the restaurant Edward and myself, while wanting to do so very much, had yet been unable to come close to each other. The man from prison, wanting us also, had been frightened by our presence and now here was this new man, a writer like myself and Edward, trying to thrust himself into the circle of my consciousness. We continued looking at each other. The man was a popular American short story writer. He wrote each year ten, twelve, fifteen magazine stories which sold for from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars each. Was he tired of writing his stories? What did he want of me? I began to grow more and more belligerent in my attitude toward him. It is, with me, a common effect of feeling my own limitations. When I feel inadequate I look about at once for someone with whom I may become irritated. The book I had been reading a half hour before, the book of “The Tales of Balzac,” lay on a table near where the man sat and his fingers now reached out and took hold of it. It was bound in soft brown leather. One who loves me and who knew of my love for the book had taken it from my room in a house in Chicago and had carried it off to an old workman who had put it in this new suit of soft brown leather. The fingers of the man on the bed were playing with the pages of the book. One got the notion that the fingers wanted to begin tearing pages from the book.