was a man who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from
emotion. To him the world spelled itself out in problems. I charged
him once with being guilty of emotion when roaring round the den
with the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he held. Could he not cuddle
a sense-delight for the problem's sake?

He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with
polysyllabic and technical terms, he would seem sometimes the
veriest criminal, in speech, face, expression, everything; at
other times the cultured and polished gentleman, and again, the
philosopher and scientist. But there was something glimmering;
there which I never caught--flashes of sincerity, of real feeling,
I imagined, which were sped ere I could grasp; echoes of the man
he once was, possibly, or hints of the man behind the mask. But
the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never knew.

"But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your
journalism?" I asked. "Never mind Loria. Tell me."

"Well, if I must." He flung one knee over the other with a short
laugh.

"In a town that shall be nameless," he began, "in fact, a city
of fifty thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave
for dollars and women for dress, an idea came to me. My front
was prepossessing, as fronts go, and my pockets empty. I had
in recollection a thought I once entertained of writing a
reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that they are reconcilable,
of course, but the room offered for scientific satire--"