I don't credit myself for the thing, but Berkhamsted slowly turned into an actual person, meeting the eyes of shopkeepers, tending properly to his personal hygiene, and occasionally even opening up to Penny about his inner life. Most humans were not malicious, only drastically misguided and desperate in their loneliness. They learned at some point that there was an eccentric core to their personality and that it was possible no one else shared their own brand of eccentricity. They put up screens around that core to shield from embarrassment and shame. For all the pompous forms in which writers
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