And for a moment, the old grimace of bestial, baffled pain passed swiftly across his ruddy features, and then he said, in a quiet and weary tone:
“Perhaps you are right. I had never thought about it in that way. Yes, I can see now that you have told me much more about yourself—your family, your life before you came here—than I have told you about mine. And yet it never occurred to me that I was being mysterious or secretive. I think it is easier for you to speak about these things than it is for me. There is a great river of energy in you and it keeps bursting over and breaking loose. You could not hold it back if you tried. With me, it’s different. I have not got that great well of life and power in me, and I could not speak as you do if I tried. Yet, Gene, if there is anything you want to know about my life before I came here, or what kind of people I came from, I would tell you willingly.”
“I have wanted to know more about you, Frank,” the other young man said. “All that I know about your life before you came here is that you come from somewhere in the Middle West, and yet are completely different from anyone I ever knew who came from there.”
“Yes,” said Starwick quietly. “From Horton, for example?” his tone was still quiet, but there was a shade of irony in it.
“Well,” the other boy said, flushing, but continuing obstinately, “—yes, from Horton. He is from Iowa; you can see, smell, read, feel Iowa all over him, in everything he says and does—”
“’It’s—a—darn—good—yarn,’” said Starwick, beginning to burble with laughter as he imitated the heavy, hearty, sonorous robustiousness of Horton’s voice when he pronounced his favourite judgment.
“Yes,” said Eugene, laughing at the imitation, “that’s it, all right—’it’s a darn good yarn.' Well, Frank, you couldn’t be more different from Horton if you had come from the planet Mars, and yet the place you came from out there in the Middle West, the kind of life you knew when you were growing up, could not have been so different from Ed Horton’s.”
“No,” said Starwick quietly. “As a matter of fact, I know where he is from—it’s not over fifty miles from the town I was born in, which is in Illinois, and the life in both places is much the same.”
He was silent a moment longer, as he stared across the river, and then continued in a quiet voice that had a calm, weary, and almost inert detachment that characterized these conversations with his friend, and that was almost entirely free of mannered speech:
