"Paul Pry!" repeated the old man at intervals. "Paul Pry! You are a selfish, hair-brained Irishman," he blazed suddenly, leaning forward, baleful and intense. "Some men feel and some men act. But you act only when you have to. Life's a battle. Do you fight? No! You glide along and watch the others. That's the way you've kept your youth. You never linger on the things that prove unpleasant. You think life an individual adventure to be lived the way you choose. It isn't. It's a link in a chain that clanks. You can't escape. You won't escape. You're a play-actor with a gift for staging yourself and you're as hungry for the limelight as a circus girl in spangles. What you need is the hurt of sacrifice. You need to suffer and forget yourself. Damn you and your brogue and your folk lore. You're the most amazing liar I've ever met." But Kenny heard no more. He stumbled out of the sitting room and slammed the door. There was a lamp burning in his bedroom. Kenny walked the floor in anger and humiliation, his fingers clenched as usual in his hair. Back there in the studio with Whitaker's arraignment ringing in his ears, he had been conscious of a terror he refused to face, a curious inner crash of something vital to his peace of mind. And he had fought it back for days, plunging into the relief of penance with a gasp of hot content. Now Adam, sitting in separate judgment, had reached out into the void and linked himself to Whitaker--to Brian, to Garry--and his barbs stung. That terror of misgiving, lulled into quietude here in the peace and charm of his life with Joan, stirred within him hydra-headed and drove the color from his face. Then he blazed into rebellion. Failure! Vanity! Self! And Adam to-night had fused the verdict of the other three. Whether or not these things were true was at first of little moment. The sting lay in the fact that someone had troubled to think them. The careless illusion, that what he thought of himself the world thought, lay at his feet pricked into utter collapse. It seemed to him as he walked the floor in a tumult of hurt pride, that the world must accept the man he knew himself to be, the man whose light-hearted existence he loved to dramatize, a brilliant painter with piquant imperfections, intensely human and delightful. He passionately demanded that it accept him so without question. Good God! No one had seemed to question until Brian in a burst of temper had brought the world about his ears. Well, let the world misjudge him if it chose. He was big enough, he knew, to hold his head above it. In a mood of lively irony he whipped forth a notebook and wrote a sarcastic summary of his shortcomings, his lips curled in hostile interest.