She started to rise, thought better of it, and sat still in her flowered chair full in the lamplight.  The little Doctor stood at the mantel-shelf, his elbow upon it, and the silence lengthened.  To do something, Sharlee pulled off her right long glove and slowly put it back again.  Then she pulled off her left long glove, and about the time she was buttoning the last button he began speaking, in a curious, lifeless voice.

“I learned to read when I was four years old out of a copy of the New York Evening Post.  It came to the house, I remember, distinctly, wrapped around two pork chops.  That seemed to be all the reading matter we had in the house for a long time—­I believe Tim was in hard luck in those days—­and by the time I was six I had read that paper all through from beginning to end, five times.  I have wondered since if that incident did not give a bent to my whole mind.  If you are familiar with the Evening Post, you may appreciate what I mean....  It came out in me exactly like a duck’s yearning for water; that deep instinct for the printed word.  Of course Tim saw that I was different from him.  He helped me a little in the early stages, and then he stood back, awed by my learning, and let me go my own gait.  When I was about eight, I learned of the existence of public libraries.  I daresay it would surprise you to know the books I was reading in this period of my life—­and writing too:  for in my eleventh year I was the author of a one-volume history of the world, besides several treatises.  And I early began to think, too.  What was the fundamental principle underlying the evolution of a higher and higher human type?  How could this principle be unified through all branches of science and reduced to an operable law?  Questions such as these kept me awake at night while I still wore short trousers.  At fourteen I was boarding alone in a kind of tenement on the East Side.  Of course I was quite different from all the people around me.  Different.  I don’t remember that they showed any affectionate interest in me, and why on earth should they?  As I say, I was different.  There was nothing there to suggest a conception of that brotherhood of man you speak of.  I was born with this impulse for isolation and work, and everything that happened to me only emphasized it.  I never had a day’s schooling in my life, and never a word of advice or admonition—­never a scolding in all my life till now.  Here is a point on which your Christian theory of living seems to me entirely too vague:  how to reconcile individual responsibility with the forces of heredity and circumstance.  From my point of view your talk would have been better rounded if you had touched on that.  Still, it was striking and interesting as it was.  I like to hear a clear statement of a point of view, and that your statement happens to riddle me, personally, of course does not affect the question in any way.  If I regard human society and human life too much