"You know something about my life, sir. Miss Oliphant knows most, of course, but you know quite a lot. If it doesn't sound most awfully conceited, I was rather a nice sort of fellow at eighteen. All the same I always felt there was something not quite right. I don't mean anything I did; I mean there always seemed to be a sheet of thick glass between me and the things I wanted to get close to. I could see through it all right, all the brightness and the colours, but somehow I couldn't get any nearer. There wasn't any feel of warmth somehow. It may sound silly to you, but I used to press up against that glass like a kid at a shop window full of things he wanted. It wasn't that I wasn't fond of things and people and so on. I was frightfully fond of them. But I couldn't manage to let them know it. Even my mother. When she wasn't there I was tremendously fond of her, but when she came--I don't know--of course I was fond then--I suppose it was my imagination. But when she wasn't there she meant an enormous lot to me, and when she came she was just a nice little mother I was very fond of but never managed to let her know--just as if I was ashamed. And it was so with everything else. I used to get excited over Shakespeare and Juliet and Hamlet and Falstaff and all those people, but they made other people seem rather shadowy. Then, when I was about twenty-one, it worried me fearfully sometimes. Other people didn't seem to be like that. I wanted to be like other people. They hadn't blocks of glass in front of them all the time. Somehow they seemed so nice and happy and warm all the time. I had a dog I was really fonder of than I was of anybody! And I wanted to be fond. I'm afraid this sounds absolute rot, sir, but I can't explain it any better." "I'm very much interested. Go on." "Well, that's lasted more or less all through my life. I'd get all in a glow about things--just things, and of course people too in a way: somebody's hair under a stained-glass window in a church, or the organ or the Psalms. But always something in between, I don't know what. It worried me because I knew I was all glow inside if I could only get it out. I was awfully fond of Miss Oliphant, for instance, but I simply couldn't let her know it. I used to go and see her sometimes and sit there wondering about it. 'Now here's a jolly sort of girl,' I used to think, 'as good as they make 'em--good-looking, sometimes nearly beautiful--and awfully fond of you. Now why can't you get on with her? Why is there always something you don't say, don't really want to say perhaps, but it would make such a difference if you could say it?' I used to ask myself that, but there was never any answer. There never has been. There it always was, that sheet of glass, as polished as you please, but shutting me right out from everything everybody else seemed to have." "But your books, Derry? You weren't shut out from everybody there!"