He turned from the window and strove to place an expression of close-lipped serenity on his face, for the train had almost reached the station. He had not seen his uncle for years and he played with dim memories of the man’s appearance. When he walked down the station platform he found that his uncle, Doctor Max Edleman, was waiting just outside of the iron gates. Doctor Edleman was a man of sixty years, sturdily rotund, with a tall body that was beginning to be disgraced by its expanding paunch. His head was unusually large and ruled by small blue eyes and the sharply turned breadth of a nose. His great, thick lips were tightly withdrawn to an outline of benign patience and his florid face ridiculed the trace of wrinkles that had flicked it. His greyish blonde hair was still fairly abundant, and all of him suggested a man who was uniquely intact because he had scarcely ever allowed life to clutch him familiarly. Since he was an Alsatian Jew, he kissed Carl carefully on both cheeks, and this annoyed Carl, not from the usual masculine reasons, but because he felt that this was a jocose insult from a fantasy that despised him, but he submitted with a flitting grimace. He took Carl to an automobile and after they had been driven away he smothered him with questions. “Your dear mother tells me that you have been acting queerly of late,” he said, in the heavily-measured way of speaking he had. “You have been refusing to speak to anyone and staying away from home--bringing worry to your dear mother. It seems to me that you have given enough care and trouble to your parents, and that it’s about time that you acted like a normal man. I understand that you have been dissipating and going with dissolute people. You are twenty-five now and there is no longer any excuse for this wildness. What have you to say for yourself?” “Don’t ask me to explain things that you couldn’t understand,” said Carl, returning to act in the falsely unpleasant play. “I have had a great grief and I’m trying in my own way to make it a friend of mine. If I tell you that your questions bring back wounds, I am sure that you will not desire to hurt me.” He gave his uncle words that would appease and disarm him, while at the same time evading his queries, and this game gave him a smooth semblance of life. “So-o, so-o, I have no desire to penetrate your secrets,” said Dr. Edleman, in a kindly voice that feebly strove to comprehend. “I am simply advising you to pull yourself together. Show some consideration for the people around you.”