Professor Hatcher and the course—that you were inviting me to make me feel more at home up here, to establish a friendly relation, to give me what information you could, to help the new people out in any way you could. But when I met you, what happened?” he went on indignantly. “Never a word about the course, about Professor Hatcher, about your being his assistant—you pumped me with questions as if I were a prisoner in the dock and you the prosecuting lawyer. You told me nothing about yourself and asked a thousand questions about me—and then you shook hands coldly, and departed!—Always this air of secrecy and mystery, Frank!” the boy went on angrily. “That’s always the way it is with you—in everything you do! And yet you wonder why people are surprised at your behaviour! For weeks at a time I see you every day. We get together in your rooms and talk and argue about everything on earth. You come and yell for me in my place at midnight and then we walk all over Cambridge in the dead of night. We go over to Posillippo’s place in Boston and eat and drink and get drunk together, and when you pass out, I bring you home and carry you upstairs and put you to bed. Then the next day, when I come round again,” the boy cried bitterly, “what has happened? I ring the bell. Your voice comes through the place as cold as hell—’Who is it?’you say.’Why,’I say,’it’s your old friend and drunken companion, Eugene Gant, who brought you home last night.’—'I’m sorry,’you say, in a tone that would freeze a polar bear—’I can’t see you. I’m busy now’—and then you hang up in my face. The season of the great mystery has now begun,” he went on sarcastically. “The great man is closeted in his sanctum composing,” he sneered. “Not writing, mind you, but composing with a gold-tipped quill plucked from the wing of a Brazilian condor—so, out, out, damned spot—don’t bother me, Gant—begone, you low fellow—on your way, burn!—the great master, Signor Francis Starwick, is upstairs in a purple cloud, having a few immortal thoughts today with Amaryllis, his pet muse—”
“Gene! Gene!” said Starwick laughing, a trace of the old-mannered accent returning to his voice again. “You are most unfair! You really are, you know!”
“No—but, Frank, that’s just the way you act,” the other said. “You can’t see enough of someone for weeks at a time and then you slam the door in his face. You pump your friends dry and tell them nothing about yourself. You try to surround everything you do with this grand romantic
