"It was the savage aspects of Nature that appealed to me. One of my earliest recollections is of a thunderstorm among the mountains. My nursery looked out upon the mountainside where the storm broke. My mother has told me that I cried till I made the nurse carry me to the window, and that I literally leaped in her arms for joy. I laughed at the lightning and clapped my hands at the thunder. The Genius of the Storm was my brother. I could not have been more than eleven months old." And there was another bit that Burton said was even better. "I have been a fighter all my life. I have had many enemies. What man who has ever done anything worth doing has not had them? But our accounts are separate, and I am willing to leave the ultimate reckoning to time." There were lots of things like that. Burton said it was like that cloak he used to wear. It would have been so noble if only he had been a little bigger. And there was an entry in his diary that I think beat everything he'd ever done. "May 3, 1905. Lankester died. Finished the last chapter of 'A Son of Thunder.' _Ave Frater, atque vale._" I thought there was a fine audacity about it, but Burton said there wasn't. Audacity implied a consciousness of danger, and Wrackham had none. Burton was in despair. "Come," I said, "there must be something in the Letters." No, the Letters were all about himself, and there wasn't anything in _him_. You couldn't conceive the futility, the fatuity, the vanity--it was a disease with him. "I couldn't have believed it, Simpson, if I hadn't seen him empty himself." "But the hinterland?" I said. "How about the hinterland? That was what you were to have opened up." "There wasn't any hinterland. He's opened himself up. You can see all there was of him. It's lamentable, Simpson, lamentable." I said it seemed to me to be supremely funny. And he said I wouldn't think it funny if I were responsible for it. "But you aren't," I said. "You must drop it. You can't be mixed up with _that_. The thing's absurd." "Absurd? Absurdity isn't in it. It's infernal, Simpson, what this business will mean to me." "Look here," I said. "This is all rot. You can't go on with it." He groaned. "I _must_ go on with it. If I don't----" "Antigone will hang herself?" "No. She won't hang herself. She'll chuck me. That's how she has me, it's how I'm fixed. Can you conceive a beastlier position?" I said I couldn't, and that if a girl of mine put me in it, by heaven, I'd chuck _her_. He smiled. "You can't chuck Antigone," he said. I said Antigone's attitude was what I didn't understand. It was inconceivable she didn't know what the things were like. "What do you suppose she really thinks of them?" That was it. She had never committed herself to an opinion. "You know," he said, "she never did." "But," I argued, "you told me yourself she said they'd represent him. And they do, don't they?" "Represent him?" He grinned in his agony. "I should think they did."