given to reading and secretive ways, and, they record, to long
silences throughout which my lips would move noiselessly. "Just
talking to one of my friends," they tell me I was used to explain;
though it was not until my career at King's College that I may be said
to have pretended to intimacy with anybody.


2

For in old Fairhaven I spent, of course, a period of ostensible study,
as four generations of my fathers had done aforetime. But in that
leisured, slatternly and ancient city I garnered a far larger harvest
of (comparatively) innocuous cakes and ale than of authentic learning,
and at my graduation carried little of moment from the place save many
memories of Bettie Hamlyn.... Her father taught me Latin at King's
College, while Bettie taught me human intimacy--almost. Looking back,
I have not ever been intimate with anybody....

Not but that I had my friends. In particular I remember those four of
us who always called ourselves--in flat defiance, just as Dumas did,
of mere arithmetic--"The Three Musketeers." I think that we loved one
another very greatly during the four years we spent together in our
youth. I like to believe we did, and to remember the boys who were
once unreasonably happy, even now. It does not seem to count, somehow,
that Aramis has taken to drink and every other inexpedient course, I
hear, and that I would not recognize him today, were we two to
encounter casually--or Athos, either, I suppose, now that he has been
so long in the Philippines.

And as for D'Artagnan--or Billy Woods, if you prefer the appellation