The query took him by surprise. It was so out of keeping with his
particular kind of self-respect that he found it almost droll. If he
had never _given_ himself to others, as his parents had, he had
certainly paid the world all he owed it. He had nothing wherewith to
reproach himself on that score. It had been a matter of satisfaction
amounting to pride that he had made his bit of money without resorting
in any single instance to methods that could be considered shady. If
complaint or criticism could not reach him here, it could not reach him
anywhere. Therefore the question as to whether there was anything wrong
in his attitude toward others was so patently absurd that it could
easily be dismissed.

He dismissed it promptly, but it came again. It came repeatedly during
that spring and summer. It forced itself on his attention. It became, in
its way, the recurrent companion of his journey. It turned up
unexpectedly at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places, and on
each occasion with an increased comprehension on his side of its
pertinence. He could look back now and trace the stages by which his
understanding of it had progressed. There was a certain small happening
in a restaurant at Yokohama; there was an accident on the dock at
Vancouver; there was a conversation on a moonlight evening up at Banff;
there was an incident during a drive in the Yosemite; these were
mile-stones on the road by which his mind had traveled on to seize the
fact that the want of touch between him and his fellow-men might be due
to the suppression of some essentially human force within himself. It
came to him that something might, after all, have been transmitted from
Hupeh and Hankow of which he had never hitherto suspected the existence.

It cannot be said that his self-questioning had produced any answer more