Andrew had so thorough a contempt for his neighbors, that he liked
anybody who did not belong to his own people. If a Turk had emigrated to
Clark township, Andrew would have fallen in love with him, and built a
divan for his special accommodation. But he loved August also for the
sake of his gentle temper and his genuine love for books. And only
August or August's mother, upon whom Andrew sometimes called, could
exorcise his demon of misanthropy, which he had nursed so long that it
was now hard to dismiss it.

Andrew Anderson belonged to a class noticed, I doubt not, by every acute
observer of provincial life in this country. In backwoods and
out-of-the-way communities literary culture produces marked
eccentricities in the life. Your bookish man at the West has never
learned to mark the distinction between the world of ideas and the
world of practical life. Instead of writing poems or romances, he falls
to living them, or at least trying to. Add a disappointment in love, and
you will surely throw him into the class of which Anderson was the
representative. For the education one gets from books is sadly
one-sided, unless it be balanced by a knowledge of the world.

Andrew Anderson had always been regarded as an oddity. A man with a good
share of ideality and literary taste, placed against the dull background
of the society of a Western neighborhood in the former half of the
century, would necessarily appear odd. Had he drifted into communities
of more culture, his eccentricity, begotten of a sense of superiority to
his surroundings, would have worn away. Had he been happily married, his
oddities would have been softened; but neither of these things happened.
He told August a very different history. For the confidence of his
"Teutonic friend" had awakened in the solitary man a desire to uncover
that story which he had kept under lock and key for so many years.