“You are a good sort, Roger,” he said at last, with an embarrassment that contrasted strangely with the bombast of a moment ago.  “I—­I’m glad you did that.  I think you’re about the only person in the world I’d have taken it from.  But I haven’t drunk much.  I couldn’t get to be much of a drunkard in three weeks, could I?” He smiled his boyish smile and disarmed me.

“But why drink at all?” I asked quietly.

“Oh, I don’t know.  It’s such an easy way to be jolly.  Everybody does it.  You can’t seem to go anywhere without somebody sticking a glass under your nose.  It’s part of the social formula.  There’s no harm in it, in reason.”

“Jerry,” I said sternly.  “You’ve begun wrong.  I don’t know whether it’s my fault or not, but you seem to be hopelessly twisted in your view of life.  You’re floundering.  Of course it’s none of my business.  I’ve done what I was paid to do, and you’ve got to work things out in your own way.  If you want to drink yourself maudlin, that’s your privilege.  I can move out, but while I’m here in this house I’m not going to sit idly by while you make a fool of yourself.”

He puffed on his pipe a moment in silence, eyeing the table leg.

“I am a fool,” he said soberly at last.  And then after a pause, “I don’t know what the trouble has been exactly, unless I’ve taken people too literally; and that’s your fault, Roger.  White with you was always white and black was black.  You taught me to say what I thought and to believe that other people said what they thought.  That was a mistake.”

“You forget,” I said, “that I wasn’t brought here to teach you worldliness.  But you can’t say that I didn’t warn you against it.”

He had gotten up and now paced the room with long strides.

“Futile, Roger!  Absolutely futile.  In my heart even then, I think, I believed you narrow.  You see, I’m frank.  A few months in the world hasn’t changed my opinion.  But I do want to think straight.”  And then with a sigh as he paused alongside of me, “It’s very perplexing sometimes.”

I knew what he was thinking about and whom, but he would not speak.

“You have thought me narrow, Jerry, because I laid my life and yours along pleasant byways and ignored the beaten track.  I’ve never told you why the world had grown distasteful to me.  I think you ought to know.  It may be worth something to you.  The old story, always new—­a girl, pretty, insincere.  I was just out of the University, with a good education, some prospects, but no money.  We became engaged.  She was going to wait for me until I got a good professorship.  But she didn’t.  In less than a year, without even the formality of breaking the engagement, she suddenly married a man who had money, a manufacturer of gas engines in Taunton, Massachusetts.  I won’t go into the details.  They’re rather sickening from this distance.  But I thought you might like to know why I’ve never particularly cared to trust women.”