His accent, his aspect, his eyes added what he did not say. He had been trembling with impatience because I was there at all. Now he was trembling with impatience because I did not answer him! His terrible eyes dared me to answer. I would have done better to hold my tongue altogether, but my agitation was so great that I lost my head. I felt that I was called upon to bring out something consoling, and heard myself murmuring in a foolish babble something or other about possible compensations for his illness, about his still being able to go on with his work, to write, to publish, in that way to propagate his ideas.... At that he burst into a laugh I would give anything in the world not to have heard. “My ideas ... ha! ha! ha!” he cried. Oh, I got myself out of the room then! I ran down the velvet carpets of the stairs, my hands over my ears. As I hurried along to the outside door I passed the salon. I saw, across the bare, gleaming desert of its waxed floor, Clotilde standing with a well-dressed man. She had a fan in her hand, and, as I looked, she opened it deftly, with a sinuous bend of her flexible wrist ... “smoothly, suavely ... with an aristocratic ...” FAIRFAX HUNTER The erratic philanthropist of our family arrived from New York one spring day with a thin, sickly-looking, middle-aged, colored man, almost in rags. “This is Fairfax Hunter,” he announced with the professional cheeriness of the doer of good. “He’s pretty badly run down and needs country air. I thought maybe you could let him sleep in the barn, and work around enough for his board.” There was nothing professionally or in any other way cheery about the colored man, who stood waiting indifferently for my decision, his knees sagging, his hollow chest sunken. As I glanced at him he raised his dark, blood-shot eyes and met my look. I decided hastily, on impulse, from something in the expression of his eyes, that we could not send him away. I led him off to the barn and showed him the corner of the hay-mow where the children sometimes sleep when our tiny house overflows with guests. He sank down on it and closed his eyes. The lids were blue and livid as though bruised. He had nothing with him except the ragged clothes on his back. When I returned to the house, the philanthropist explained that Fairfax was a Virginia negro--“You could tell that from his name, of course”--who had come to New York and fallen into bad ways, “drink, etc.... But there’s something about him....” Yes, I agreed to that. There was something about him.... Fairfax lived with us after this for more than four years, the last years of his life. He was really very ill at first, the merest little flicker of life puffing uncertainly in and out of the bag of skin and bones which was his body. The doctor said that rest and food were the only medicines for him. He lay like a piece of sodden driftwood for long hours on the edge of the hay where the sun caught it.