Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/81

Rh "Mine lack the glow that is in yours," I admitted gloomily.

"Glow?" he echoed. "So that's what it is?" Then he looked at me queerly and added: "Yes, your eyes have a sort of dead luster instead—like Rover's, like a beast's. Maybe then that glow is the something you always don't seem to have."

And it was thus I grew up. I seemed fashioned for no manner of social mixing, though I fought desperately to analyze and overcome my failing. I grew to dread being where were numbers of people I knew, for it was in the midst of crowds and festivities that I became most despondent.

Perhaps I might be in a city park thronged with a holiday crowd; bands playing, bright motor parties flashing by, dancing in the pavilions, cries and shouts and merry laughter all about me. Everybody else would be actors on the world's stage of enjoyment, and I,—I would be merely a spectator, expected by the world to be nothing more than that, and gazed upon with vague curiosity when I stepped beyond the bounds of neutrality. Somewhere in the vicinity, just as certainly, my twin brother Philip would be the life of a party of young folks—not altogether because he sought popularity, but because it was showered upon, thrust upon him. People spontaneously elected him the lion of every occasion.

Yet I do not think that envy of my brother's better fortune was at any time tinged with hatred, or that malice toward him was in my heart. It was compassion, intense compassion for myself—for my wretched, lonely self—that engulfed me.

depths of human misery that I lived through in those days of hope-strangling isolation!

What could it be that I lacked? I asked myself that a thousand times. We two, Philip and I, were in face and form the image of one another. Yet, while Philip was invariably deferred to in his slightest whim and made much of, on the other hand acquaintances would pass me by, perhaps at most to favor me with a patronizing nod; often they would not even give sign that they recognized me.

I have felt at times that if I were merely a ghost I could scarcely be less tangible so far as my fellows were concerned.

At college I led the same isolated existence. In the desperation of inexperienced youth trying to find its true level and congenial company, I fell in with abandoned rascals, gay youngsters who sought to get all there was of pleasure in life along forbidden paths. With them I joined in drinking orgies, learned every species of modem gambling and sought out the gilded dance halls.

It was no use. My flirting with folly was as futile as my other experiments. The half-world suffered my presence with a spontaneous charity all it own, but as one of its fold it would never recognize me.

Even Beelzebub seemed to have looked up my spiritual number and found me not worth while.

One night I overheard two chums discussing me.

"Redfield is certainly an odd fish," a young chap named Pallister was remarking. "Not exactly a bore, but a dead one—no more color to him than a ripe celery stalk—he can't even make a success of getting drunk."

I waited to hear no more. But that sneer brought me to my better senses and developed a fixed resolution that had a deep-driven effect on the course of my after life.

From that day forward I walked clean, eschewing even the suspicion of frivolity. I had evolved a princi-