"No; that isn't what I meant at all. If you're interested, I'd like to
have you know about me. It isn't much, though."

"You'll think me prying," she objected.

"I think you a sort of friend of a day, who is going away very soon
leaving pleasant memories," he answered, smiling. "A butterfly visit.
I'm not much given to talking, but if you'd like it--"

"Of course I should like it."

So he sketched for her his history. His mother he barely remembered;
"dark, and quite beautiful, I believe, though that might be only a
child's vision; my father rarely spoke of her, but I think all the
emotional side of his life was buried with her." The father, an American
of Danish ancestry, had been ousted from the chair of Sociology in old,
conservative Havenden College, as the logical result of his writings
which, because they shrewdly and clearly pointed out certain ulcerous
spots in the economic and social system, were denounced as "radical" by
a Board of Trustees honestly devoted to Business Ideals. Having a small
income of his own, the ex-Professor decided upon a life of investigatory
vagrancy, with special reference to studies, at first hand, of the
voluntarily unemployed. Not knowing what else to do with the only child
of his marriage, he took the boy along. Contemptuous of, rather than
embittered against, an academic system which had dispensed with his
services because it was afraid of the light--"When you cast a light,
they see only the resultant shadows," was one of his sayings which had
remained with Banneker--he had resolved to educate the child himself.

Their life was spent frugally in cities where they haunted libraries,