"Come up to the library, if you've a few minutes to spare an invalid.

Please go first; I'm a trifle lame yet." "I--I am sorry," muttered Plank, "very, very sorry." At first, in the library, Plank was awkward and silent, finding nothing to say, and nowhere to dispose of his hands, until Siward gave him a cigar to occupy his fingers.

Even then he continued to sit uncomfortably, his bulk balanced on a rickety, spindle-legged chair, which he stubbornly refused to exchange for another, at Siward's suggestion, out of sheer embarrassment, and with a confused idea that his refusal would somehow ultimately put him at his ease with his surroundings.
Siward, secretly amused, rang for tea, although the hour was early.
After a little while, either the toast or the tea appeared to act on Plank as a lingual laxative, for he began suddenly to talk, which is characteristic of bashful men; and Siward gravely helped him on when he floundered and turned shy.

After a little, matters went very well with them, and Plank, much more at ease than he had ever dared to hope he could be with Siward, talked and talked; and Siward, his crutches across his knees, lay back in his arm-chair, chatting with that winning informality so becoming to men who are unconscious of their charm.
Watching Plank, it occurred to him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play.

On Plank's round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine placidity of a dogged man who waits his turn.
Plank spoke of himself after a while, sounding the personal note with tentative timidity.