If only it had been hilarity, or crudity, or wildness that greeted them! Their wait had been long enough and tense, with them talking in low voices--asking each other hesitating little questions about what they thought might happen. Suddenly some one started back with a gasp, and they all turned to find his serious child’s face outside the window, intently peering at them. There is no need to describe his actions subsequent to his entering the house. He was not outlandish. He was merely quiet in voice and manner with an appalling drunkard’s dignity, and he was fully dressed. The cheer had all gone out of him. He talked for an hour without pause, first to one, then to another, entirely about himself and with horrible seriousness. Sententiousness and pomposity from the Great Pan Jandrum! His tone was threatening; almost challenging all the while, and there was that in his face which prevented any thought of stopping him. Intimate, personal, half-finished thoughts issued from him like loathsome abortions. He took the beautiful Mrs. Galhoolie’s hand in his and told her he reverenced and respected her so much that he could not ever love her as the others did. Everyone was left knowing in excessively sentimental terms just what he thought of them. Everything he uttered was an indecent exposure; every sentence tore away another portion of the disguise--as it looked--that he had been so long building. He was operating on himself in their presence, exposing the nauseating entrails of his mind--so comfortable from the outside--and forcing upon them the knowledge that he was as sordid and commonplace as they in their very worst moments. When they brought him home and left him they could hear him sobbing--great, deep-voiced, mountainous sobs that shook his bed. But for me, the story of the evening gave the key to the man and made him interesting. You may admire a point of view and you may even bask in it, but you cannot make it your friend. It sounded precisely as though a pent-up flood of gnawing sentiment and egoism had been let loose in him. He must have had incurably Byronic tendencies which had at some time or other offended his critical sense, and you saw him now as a man despairingly and acutely aware of his vulgar heritage of ego who had with his almost passionate interest in the fortunes of other people built up the most powerful defense against himself that he could think of. And there always was, too, I reflected, something of the fanatic about his rôle of humorist.