"I have heard you! Now I want you to listen to me! I wish to tell you a story. It is out of one man's deepest yet daily life... my own life. Most of what I wish to tell happened long before I knew you. It was far away, it was in what used to be my own country. After I tell it, you will be one of very few people in all the world who have known... even suspected... what happened to me. In telling you, I trust you with my social honour... with all that is outwardly and inwardly myself. And I shall probably pay a penalty... just because you hear the wretched history, Imre... you! For, before it ends, it has to do with you; as well as with something that you have just spoken of—so fiercely! I mean—how far a man, deserving to be called a man, refusing, as surely as God lives and has made him, to believe that he is.... what did you call him? ... 'a miserable, womanish, counterfeit... outcast'... even if he be incomprehensible to himself... how such a being can suffer and be ruined in his innermost life and peace, by a soul-tragedy which he nev-
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