In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

A girl friend of his mother snatched him away from the wise arms, to hug and coddle him; let him slip and dropped him from the balcony where they were standing. This is the origin of the sad mutilations with which Randolph Bourne went through life. The tale has the true depth of a legend. The affection of a young woman, clumsy with unskilled love; the desire to share, to help, perhaps-and as aftermath, the lifetime of agony and visible disgrace. This is the sort of irony that Randolph relished, and bore with him through the world. Beholding him, one felt that his deformity somehow was not the profane traditional one: it was rather the stigmata of some miscarried loveliness.

He was very deformed. Not alone was he dwarfed and hunchbacked: his face was twisted, he had a tortured ear, his color was sallow and his breathing was audible and hard. He walked in a cape that hid him. He took a chair for the first time in your presence, let fall the black shroud about him, and revealed a form so mangled that you despaired ever to find sufficient ease for the sort of conversation his immediately brilliant mind demanded.