"_Because_ I was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way. My father was a country doctor--a surgeon. One day he sent me into his surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me--I was a boy about fifteen at the time--to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?" "You fainted?--You were ill on the spot?" "No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away." A slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for the vibration of some spiritual recoil. "What do you say to that?" "I don't say anything." "My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened." "They might have known," she said. "They might have known what?" "That you were different." "They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that I _was_ a man--that I wasn't different after all." "Well--you proved it." "If I did my father never knew it." "And your mother?" she said softly. "I believe she knew." "But wasn't she glad to know you were different?" "I never let her know, really, how different I was." "You kept it to yourself?" "It was the only way to keep it." "Your genius?" "If you choose to call it that." "The thing," she said, "that made you different." "You see," he said, "they didn't understand that _that_ was where I was most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now." "You couldn't lose it." "I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a better berth in Bombay; and it went again." She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of something more than it. "You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and there's the terror--_the_ most awful terror there is--of never getting back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of it without seeing it--seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else matters. Nothing else is." She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant. "And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the other part remains where it got to." "I see."