There he stopped and poked the fire until the young professor, overcome with sympathetic curiosity, urged him to go on.  He sighed at this, and said:  “Why, fortune ought not to have made me an only child, although I can’t say that I’ve ever longed for brothers or sisters....  But now I feel that I should like very much to have some nephews and nieces.  I never could have stood having children of my own—­I should have been crushed under the responsibility; but a nephew, now—­a young creature with a brain and soul developing—­to whom I could be a help ...  I find as I get older that I have an empty feeling as the college year draws to a close.  I have kept myself so remote from human life, for fear of being dragged into that feverish center of it which has always so repelled me, that now I do not touch it at all.”  He ended with a gentle resignation, taking off his glasses and rubbing them sadly:  “I suppose I do not deserve anything more, because I was not willing to bear the burdens of common life ... and yet it almost seems that there should be some place for such as I—?”

The heart of his young friend had melted within him at this revelation of the submissive isolation of the sweet-tempered, cool-blooded old scholar.  Carelessly confident, like all the young, that any amount or variety of human affection could be his for the asking, he promised himself to make the dear old recluse a sharer in his own wealth; but the next year he married a handsome, ambitious girl who made him accept an advantageous offer in the commercial world.  With his disappearance, the solitary door in the prison walls which kept J.M. remote from his fellows swung shut.

He looked so hopelessly dull and becalmed after this that the president was moved to force on him a little outing.  Stopping one day with his touring-car at the door of the library, he fairly swept the sedentary little man off his feet and out to the machine.  J.M. did not catch his breath during the swift flight to the president’s summer home in a trim, green, elm-shaded village in the Berkshires.  When he recovered a little he was startled by the resemblance of the place to his old recollections of Woodville.  There were the same white houses with green shutters, and big white pillars to the porches, the same green lawns and clumps of peonies and carefully tended rose-gardens, and the same old-New-England air of distance from the hurry and smoky energy of modern commercial life.

He spoke of this to the president’s wife and she explained that it was no wonder.  The village was virtually owned by a summer colony of oldish people who had lived there in their youth and who devoted themselves to keeping the old place just as it had been.  “We haven’t any children to bother about any more,” she said, laughing, “so we take it out in putting knockers on the doors instead of bells and in keeping the grocery-stores out of sight so that the looks of the village green shan’t be spoiled.”