themselves out to do everything they can to make your life comfortable and pleasant. You know these swells over on Beacon Hill in Boston, and you have some grand, mysterious and wealthy kind of life with them. Then you have another group here at the university—people like Egan, and Hugh Dodd and myself. And at the end, Frank,” the boy said almost bitterly—“what is the purpose of all this secrecy and separation among your friends? There’s something so damned arrogant and cold and calculating about it—it’s almost as if you were one of these damned, wretched, self-centred fools who have their little time and place for everything—an hour for social recreation and an hour for useful reading, another hour for healthy exercise, and then four hours for business, an hour for the concert and an hour for the play, an hour for’business contracts’and an hour for friendship—Surely to God, Frank, you of all people on earth are not one of these damned, smug, vain, self-centred egoists—who would milk this earth as if it were a great milk cow here solely for their enrichment, and who, at the end, in spite of all their damned, miserable, self-seeking profit for themselves remain nothing but the God-damned smug, sterile, misbegotten set of impotent and life-hating bastards that they are—Surely to God, you, of all people in the world, are not one of these,” he fairly yelled, and sat there panting, exhausted by the tirade, and glaring at the other youth with wild, resentful eyes.
“Eugene!” cried Starwick sharply, his ruddy features darkened with an angry glow. “You are being most unjust! What are you saying simply is not true.” He was silent a moment, his face red and angry-looking, as he stared out across the river—“If I had known that you felt this way,” he went on quietly, “I should have introduced you to my other friends—what you call these separate groups of people—long ago. You may meet them any time you wish,” he concluded. “It simply never occurred to me that you would be interested in knowing them.”
“Oh, Frank, I’m not!” the other boy cried impatiently, with a dismissing movement of the hand. “I don’t want to meet them—I don’t care who they are—or how rich and fashionable or’artistic’they may be. The thing I was kicking about was what seemed to me to be your air of secrecy—the mysterious manner in which you go about things: it seemed to me that there was something deliberately calculating and secretive in the way you shut one part of your life off from the people who know and like you best.”
Starwick made no answer for a moment, but sat looking out across the river.
