"Here!" a well-contained voice replied as he entered the room, "in your library, sitting in your favorite chair, eating your food, drinking your rum--in short, exercising every prerogative a man can assume who has unfettered himself from worldly responsibilities, and awaits the command of his master." "You certainly are better," Huntington exclaimed, looking at him critically, astonished by the tone of his remark. "Except for my weakness," Hamlen answered, holding out his hand, "better than I've been in all my life." "You amaze me!" Huntington exclaimed. "I hoped for an improvement, but this return to more than your best self--" "I've fought the fight, my friend, and this is the result." "It is a positive triumph!" Huntington drew a chair beside the patient, and regarded him with an expression of mystified gratification. "What in the world has happened?" "You went away and gave me a chance to think," Hamlen replied seriously. "Do you know, Huntington, I'm convinced that there ought to be a law condemning every human being to solitary confinement for a certain period each year, to make him think. Deprive him of his companions, his books, his writing materials--everything, and just force him to think. We take things so much for granted, we accept so many half-truths, we so easily lose our sense of proportion." "That is a capital idea, but you've done your share of it already." "My thoughts were misdirected. You not only gave me the opportunity but something basic on which to build. I wonder if you realize how pitilessly you laid me bare!" "I had no intention, my dear fellow--" "Oh, it was right; that was the very thing which saved me. I was sincere in feeling myself sunk in degradation, in wanting to end it all, and I hated you for standing in my way. But when you laid claim to my life, which I valued so slightly, I began to analyze it to discover why you cared to have it. You have done more for me, Huntington, than any human being ever did for a fellow-creature, and why you did it was past my comprehension." "We are bound by ties of a great brotherhood," Huntington explained. "No man I ever saw before has considered them so sacred. You are an idealist, Huntington. Your devotion to college and to college responsibilities amounts to a fetish. But I thank God for your idealism: it is not what college relations really are but what they ought to be!" "I never will admit that, Hamlen." "Of course you won't; if you did you would lose your idealism. I saw all this, and it gave me my explanation: what you have done for me, Huntington, you would have done for any other college man under the same circumstances. It was not because of any claim the individual had upon you, but rather the acknowledgment of the greater appeal made by that brotherhood you venerate." "No, Hamlen; you must not depreciate the appeal which your own personality made from the first."