Let's look at you." It was exactly that--that brusque, unsentimental appeal--that Michael needed.

He saw himself at that moment, as Falbe saw him, a shelled and muffled figure, intangible and withdrawn, but observing, as it were, through eye-holes, and giving nothing in exchange for what he saw.
"I'm sorry," he said.

"It's quite true what you tell me.

I'm like that.
But it really has never struck me that anybody cared to know." Falbe ceased digging his excavation in the pine-needles and looked up on Michael.
"Good Lord, man!" he said; "people care if you'll only allow them to.
The indifference of other people is a false term for the secretiveness of oneself.

How can they care, unless you let them know what there is to care for ?" "But I'm completely uninteresting," said Michael.
"Yes; I'll judge of that," said Falbe.
Slowly, and with diffident pauses, Michael began to speak of himself, feeling at first as if he was undressing in public.