He could see how
utterly different was Falbe's general conception and practice of
life from his own; to Michael it had always been a congregation of
strangers--Francis excepted--who moved about, busy with each other and
with affairs that had no allure for him, and were, though not uncivil,
wholly alien to him. He was willing to grant that this alienation, this
absence of comradeship which he had missed all his life, was of his own
making, in so far as his shyness and sensitiveness were the cause of it;
but in effect he had never yet had a friend, because he had never yet
taken his shutters down, so to speak, or thrown his front door open. He
had peeped out through chinks, and felt how lonely he was, but he had
not given anyone a chance to get in.
Falbe, on the other hand, lived at his window, ready to hail the
passer-by, even as he had hailed Michael, with cheerful words. There
he lounged in his shirt-sleeves, you might say, with elbows on the
window-sill; and not from politeness, but from good fellowship, from the
fact that he liked people, was at home to everybody. He liked people;
there was the key to it. And Michael, however much he might be capable
of liking people, had up till now given them no sign of it.
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