PART TWO

I

The fall of his eighteenth birthday, Quincy went to college. He had completed his examinations in June; and he had passed them with a single deficiency. Although his college was out-of-town, these hours of trial had been set in the city—in a vast, cold gymnasium filled with little stubby tables and larded with apparatus that in their similarity to instruments of torture seemed appropriate enough. Here he sat, weighed down with the stupid sense of the authority about him. He had gazed at the printed slips with their silly, circumscribed demands upon his knowledge and been impressed with the irrelevance of higher education. In one instance, he had been impressed too well. He had failed. And for the purpose of passing off this failure, he had now to start from home two days before the beginning of the term.

He took his leave in the sitting room. The family had just returned from the country. The room was still muffled in camphor draperies and grey-blue covers. There were no curtains. And the cleaning to which the sedulous Sarah had subjected it had robbed the room of the one glow of ease and warmth it might have kept—the dusty deposits of the summer. The room, then, was cold and harsh. The table shone out with its bare mahogany red. All else was under the protective cloths.

Quincy came down, suit-case in hand. Upstairs, he had applied the last minute attentions, putting off the ultimate plunge with a zealous mania for details, much as a diver sticks his toe into the water. Thrice he had locked his suit-case and reopened it—to brush his hair again, to take out a letter of announcement for the Dean, to see if aught was missing. Long he looked at himself in the mirror, adjusting his fresh collar and his tie. Then he unfastened his silver watch from its leather chain and placed it before him on the bureau for constant consultation. Changing his mind, fearful lest he forget it, he replaced it in his pocket. This also, made him nervous. He wished to track the lapse of time. So once again, the watch was out before him. He wondered if his watch was right. It was really too early to leave for the train. But perhaps it was five minutes later than he thought. In a trice, he had convinced himself of this imagining,—was ready to act upon it. He flung on his coat, strapped his suit-case and made for the stairs. He descended, clumsily, conscious of his feet.

He placed his suit-case in the hall and entered the room, where his mother and Adelaide were seated.

“Well, is it time to go?” his mother spoke. “Or can you sit down a few minutes?”

“I’m afraid not, Mama.” The boy shifted nervously from foot to foot.

With this Adelaide got up.

“Have you room for this in your valise?” she asked, handing him a tidily wrapped box.

Quincy reached out his hand. “What is it?”

“Oh, I thought—perhaps—” she faltered, “now you are to be a college man—you might want to smoke.” There was a pause. “It is a tin of cigarettes.”

“Child! Why put the idea into his head?” cried Sarah.

“I had the idea before,” Quincy retorted. And then, he thanked his sister who stood expectant, not yet knowing whether she had done a thing extremely felicitous or awkward.

“Even if I don’t smoke there’ll be plenty of the boys who will,” was his colorless observation. He slipped the box into his pocket.

“Good-bye, Quincy, and good luck.” Adelaide kissed him. “And don’t get homesick.”

“Homesick? No chance!”

Sarah took his head in her hands. “Won’t you get a little homesick for me, dear—just once in a while?”

At this, Quincy smiled. He preferred it. Yet of the two, his sister’s had been the selfless remark.

He kissed them both—unostentatiously, though both longed to linger with his dark, serious head beside their own. Both of these women loved him. Yet, at the time, they were no more than momentary details on his path—obstructions of no import on his vision. So he drew his head away from their hands and lips as quickly as he could. And then, stung triflingly by conscience at the fact that he had done just this, he stepped back, half-way across the room, kissed them again, saw the gleam of tears in their eyes, and sturdily marched out.

“Don’t come downstairs!”

But they stepped after him. Adelaide helped him on with his new coat. His mother gave a loving brush to his new hat. And then, Adelaide spoke.

“Oh, Quincy! You’ve fifty minutes yet.” She had espied the parlor clock.

The boy held back, ashamed at his puerile impatience. The girl clapped her hands with a sudden thought that evidently gave her pleasure.

“I’ll take you to the station, Quincy.”

“No. That’s ridiculous.” He did not want her.

“And why not?” said Sarah. “It’s an excellent idea.”

“Do let me! I’ll just be a minute. I’ll throw on a coat and hat—”

Quincy stood, unable to reject her; lacking the wits for it, yet loathing this adventitious family concern, clinging upon him on his way to college. Adelaide dashed upstairs.

“That’s a very good idea,” pondered Sarah. “You’ve lots of time.”

Quincy paced nervously up and down; he was distressed. He did not like what seemed the significance of this—he did not like the afterthought.

And then an idea came to Sarah that gave her pleasure also.

“Why,” she said, “you might have the machine! I’m sure your father hasn’t got it.”

“No! No! No!” cried Quincy, heaping on this proposal much of the vehement denial brought over from the first.

“Why, you silly boy?”

“I don’t want it. I’ll take the car.”

“Nonsense!” Sarah looked uncomprehending, doubting his protest. Then, she moved toward the telephone.

“Mother,” said Quincy from his position near the door, “I don’t want your automobile. Do you hear? If you call for it, I’ll not take it. I’ll not take it, even if it should come this very minute.”

Sarah paused.

“You’re a very ungracious boy,” she said slowly.

His face turned pale, with a white fire.

“Oh, am I?—Very well, then—.” He grasped his suit-case. Thrusting his hat low over his eyes, he dashed away.

Adelaide returned to the head of the stairs. A cozy rough wool coat was close against her body; a brown cloth hat clustered with strawberries was atilt over her wavy hair. She saw her mother standing alone near the open door.

“Has he gone?” she said.

Sarah sighed. “The usual Quincy—”

And as she went on, Adelaide descended. “I offered him the car and he flew into a passion—into a passion, and out of the house. Oh! Oh!”

Now Adelaide was beside her.

“One would think, the way he acts, we didn’t love him.”

“We don’t love him right, Mama,” the girl spoke calmly and threw off her coat.

Sarah turned on her with anger: “How dare you say that? What’s wrong with you now? What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s true. And he feels it.”

All of Sarah’s suppressed emotion turned on her daughter.

“Didn’t I offer him the machine, out of consideration?” she cried with a rasp in her voice.

“Yes—at the last minute. For a guest, you’d have thought of it two hours ago.”

“Well, what about your suggestion. When did you think of offering to go with him?”

“At the last minute, also, Mama.”

“And does that prove you don’t love him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Does that prove you don’t love him enough?”

“I didn’t say that either.”

Sarah threw out her arms in a gesture of bewilderment.

“I said we didn’t love him right,” Adelaide continued.

Sarah gazed in silence at her daughter. She was awed by the conciseness of the answer, however little she understood it. Then, fronting her, she put her question.

“Why?”

The girl shook her head.

“It’s not our fault. It’s in the house. It’s the spirit here. I can’t explain. But you should understand. We can’t help it. But he feels it. Yes,—he feels it.”

She stopped and the two women were still. Both of them were looking far, vaguely, beyond the open door.

“He’s gone, now,” said Sarah.

II

The morning of Quincy’s departure, it had rained. Then, it had cleared. To the plashy gloom of an autumn storm succeeded a sudden cheer of Indian Summer. When, in his “usual” manner, the boy dashed from the house, the sky was a shrill blue shredded with fragile clouds. And below foot, were still the puddles and grey odors of the rain.

Filled with a painful, pleasurable sense of having been unjust, Quincy boarded a car at the corner. Then he alighted. There was so much time, he had decided to walk from the place of transfer—a trifling journey.

In the car his thoughts had been at once intensely personal and inchoate. He was thinking back. He resolved to write his mother an affectionate letter of apology. Yes: he would write to Adelaide as well. He had not wanted to bother them. Many a time, they had made him feel—oh, perhaps not these two, but they—how little it was wise to bother them. He was going to a new life. He wished to start on it, alone. There was no reason in not cutting clean, when cut one had to. His last thought gave him pause. He was going to a new life. A new life. Life....

The car clanked and screeched, the braked wheels slid—to a halt; the conductor bawled out the place of transfer.

Quincy was suddenly aware only of the pungent dampness in the car. He pushed his way to the platform, clumsily. But what hindered him was solely the fact of his suit-case. He stepped down—into a wide, flat puddle. And he was piqued, only because his shoes were freshly shined. He righted himself, waiting for a safe chance to cross. With his thoughts had come the need of moving. And this had stopped his thoughts. He stood midway in the sopping thoroughfare with the sun’s glad drench above his head. The new life began.

He heard the voices. The starting, clanking, abruptly halted cars that swung with groan of wood and iron. The darting flash of wagons, brittle and uproarious of wheel over the asphalt’s crevices or the weave of tracks. The heavier trucks, plunging along with perched, gesticulating drivers, that gave forth their rumble like a flood of undertone shot through with lighter notes. The dull-rhythmed matrix—the crowd’s shuffle—wherein the metallic urge of cars, the tangent flurries of light wheels, the impress of thick masses glowed and hummed and pounded while the air swung response. And through it all, catching it up, knitting it together, the web—the web whereof now Quincy grew aware. For it was none of these: not the traffic’s voice, not the crowd’s shuffle. It was the crowd itself.

Everywhere—interminably movemented, yet inexorably fixed. The base, the weave, the limits of this cacophony. The web, gapped solitarily by the air—and air that stifled, died within the web’s cloying interstices.

The crowd closed on Quincy’s heart. And Quincy felt the crowd. He grasped his burden tightly, and pushed ahead. But meantime, and for the first time, he was a-feel with this new substance. What it gave him went to all the senses. It was a sharp, quick taste that drew and a pungent odor that clouded eyes. It was subtle and it was slight. Yet, once impinged upon his being, it remained. And now, he recognized it:—

A desire not to go on—a yearning to cease altogether. A weariness, which in its scope was cosmic, yet in its application seemed almost not to be!

Still, the boy’s energies pricked him on. There was no tremor of hesitation in his walk or in his face. But it was as if the spirit that had forged these energies by which he was now acting, had flickered out. As the light of a star, after the star has died, pierces through space uncaring, so it seemed that Quincy pursued his goal, with his source gone. All this about him seemed to have sapped his soul. It was all so huge and crass and crushing. It cared so little for him. He was a particle within it, too light to sink, too heavy to ascend.

The crowd. And the boy on his way to college.

He had not reckoned on this thing. He had lived within it all of his life. Yet, until this moment, it had been as remote as non-existence. Now, ere he knew how, it was at work upon him. And already, he was weary!

Quincy knew enough—just enough—to be horrified at this; to feel the fitness of a venturing spirit, eager, elastic, for a beginning; and to grow sick at the lack. He did not know enough even to blame the crowd. Nor did he know that the glad face and joyous limbs of the pioneer are figments of fable-weaving; that the mood of the morning is ever a grim facing forward against the soul’s pull backward; and that he shared this weariness that so distressed him with most men who, aching of sinew and sick of heart, go out and win.

An impulse murmured to go back. He crushed it. Back, there was all he yearned to overcome. The impulse which made it preferable to the unknown filled him with shame. He had not been this shirker, two years past. He trudged on. Before him, was much unknown, but one thing certain—Struggle. As he envisaged this, a part of Quincy blanched. It was not because he feared; because he lacked daring for pain or for discomfort. Both of these lay behind him. He thought, and rightly, to have sounded them. What was unbearable in the future was the struggle, the exertion. Whatever the fruit of it, with struggle the price seemed vain. Whatever the bitter emptiness he left behind, since he could lie still and without deeds, seemed welcome. While the world shrieked about him, horrible in its clangor of steel and its dull delirium of feet, Quincy was filled with the desire to share nothing with it, to cut loose, aloof, to cast out whatever element he might conceal in common.

He was weary because this crowd seemed tireless; he craved peace because it breathed out conflict; he longed for abnegation, though it was failure, since the crowd was as it was, with its attainment. Subreptively, unformed, the desire stirred within him, if this hideous pervasion was life, for non-existence.

And then, he thrust that from him, also. For though the source seemed cold, the light was flashing forth. Clearly, he knew that he did not court the future; that he would fain have gone from his past into a region without measure. But none the less, he had reached the station. While his soul yearned for a state without time, his eyes had seen the clock and his brain grasped that it was later than he had surmised. While his soul longed for an endless truce to goal and striving, he had doubled his pace so as not to miss his train. And with his heart set against any sequel whatsoever, he had bought a ticket for the immediate future!

The crowds swirled in eddies and great streams to the narrow gates that sucked them in. The vibrance of movement and adventure hummed in the air. The incense of man’s activity reached his nostrils. He, also, was caught up. His feet carried him down the throbbing passage. The long, silent train lay out like a mystery, beyond his sight. There was a Song in this commotion; a Promise in these steps....

Quincy caught hold of the platform bar. And a lithe, eager body swung aboard the train.

III

Quincy found one of the last seats. A string of cars at the rear had not been opened. By this means, the astute Company packed its patrons economically and, as the traffic overflowed, opened another car. The boy made himself at ease by the window. He hoped fervently that no one would come beside him. But especially, he hoped that no one of the other fellows whom he saw grouped and chatting in the corridor, on the platform, would be his neighbor, if neighbor he must have. Quincy feared that with one of these there would be danger of a conversation. And he feared that. He feared it, because he felt that he should have things in common with his prospective mates. And he had none—that he could think of.

Greatly to his relief, then, just as the filled train glided into motion, a huge man with a great black slouch hat, sat down beside him.

Quincy gazed steadily out of the window. He half observed his neighbor open a leather case, draw from it a batch of pamphlets and proceed, quietly, unflaggingly, to go through them. They were well on their way before the boy’s interest made him turn for a look at the nature of these pamphlets. The big man had placed all of them back in his case, save the one he was reading. This one he held close, vertically, before his face so that Quincy could not possibly have seen its subject. He did remark, however, that this man must be very near-sighted. Then he looked at him more keenly. Could it be that he was a professor? His bad eyes and his portfolio seemed proof. But his huge, strong body and his western hat belied it. The man had a strong, yet gentle face. All of his features were large, yet all of them were soft in an harmonious expression. As he read, he bit nervously at his lips. His massive, fleshy hands clutched periodically at the fragile paper, rumpling it. His nostrils distended as he took breath.

And then, of a sudden, as Quincy looked, the man turned from his reading and their gaze met. The boy was embarrassed. He wished to look away. But the big brown smile in the man’s eyes held his.

“This your first year?”

“Yes, sir.” He wished to ask whether “freshman” was really writ so large upon him. But instead, he smiled rather sheepishly.

“This paper,” the man went on, talking with a free confidence, “is so stupid, that if I go on reading it, I shall be ill-humored by the time I reach home.” He placed it, face-downward, on his lap.

“M-may I see what it is?” Quincy stammered.

The man broke into a hearty laughter that sounded liquid above the rush of the train.

“Oh! Oh!” he said, “after what I’ve said of it, it would scarcely be discreet—would it, now? You see, it’s by a colleague.” He seemed to leave the verdict to Quincy.

“Excuse me. I—I didn’t know.”

“You agree, then?” asked the man.

“I certainly do,” replied Quincy with conviction.

“Good!” And this paper also, was thrust back with the others. There was a pause. Then, he continued: “I’ll tell you, however, generally, what it was that I found stupid. It was one of those ‘common-sense’ ideas. They’re usually stupid. This is a paper on education. It talks chiefly of teaching rules.”

“Yes?” asked the boy, awaiting more.

“Well—isn’t that enough? Can you imagine anything more stupid and less educational than teaching rules?”

Quincy beamed with amazement. “You really think that?”

“Have rules ever done you any good,” went on the professor; “any rules except such as you dug out for yourself? What’s a good rule on a false basis? And what’s the use of any rule at all, if the right thing’s underneath? Do you have to teach a rule to a tree to make it grow—or to a ball to make it fall? If we build up from a right basis, the rest—the right rule—must follow by mathematical law. Isn’t that reasonable? And if, with a true foundation, the rules an individual derives clash with the rules accepted,—why the accepted rules are simply wrong. I think, to tell you the truth, that we all teach rules the way the good-hearted practice charity—to overcome with an act what has grown wrong from the bottom up.”

“I’m glad to hear you talk that way,” replied the boy. “It seems strange.”

The man laughed.

“Do you—” Quincy hesitated,—“Are you a—teacher?”

“My name is Deering.”

“Not Professor Lawrence Deering!” Quincy demanded. The other nodded.

So this was the famous Professor Deering. “Oh! And you teach that way yourself?”

“I try to. But it’s hard in an institution that doesn’t agree with you. Hard also, with products so nearly finished as—say—you are. I should have gone in for kindergartening.”

What an open candor this was, thought Quincy, from a great man to an unknown boy! From this moment of realization, he would have gone far and suffered much for Professor Deering. Then it occurred to him that since he knew the professor’s name, he must announce his own.

“My name is Burt—Quincy Burt,” he said.

The great man’s hand went out warmly. “I am glad to know you, Mr. Burt. I hope you will like your college years.”

“Oh—I’m sure now, I will!”

“You have lots of friends, I suppose, entering with you?”

“None at all,” the boy answered quickly, “I come from a private school in New York. There were only ten boys in my class. None of them is coming up here.”

“Then, if I may ask,” the man spoke deferentially, “why are you so confident that you will enjoy your college course?”

Quincy looked up with feeling, at his questioner.

“I seem somehow,” he said, “to have been welcomed.”

There was a note in the boy’s voice that silenced the big man. Quincy, in that moment, felt that Professor Deering must be very sensitive. He also would have been silenced by such a leak of sentiment.

“You make me glad I spoke to you,” he said at last. “Our college is not too well adapted for boys who enter without a crowd. That very fact is a good thing, if the boys really have the stuff.”

Quincy’s amazement here was that a scholar famed throughout America should employ slang.

“What do you mean, exactly, by stuff?” he asked.

Professor Deering examined him closely. “Well, you see,” he said, “there’s an empire of false standards in such a college as ours,—in all American institutions, to speak frankly. The flaw lies in the creed, which is fostered by the faculty, that college is a place to do things, a standard-in-itself, a place-in-itself. For this arbitrary creed, arbitrary goals and targets are set up—secret societies, athletic insignia, a host of extra-curriculum activities. These are looked on, not as play, but as ends. They become the business of the bulk of our students. By senior year, the students themselves laugh at them—at the professors for fostering them—with real life before them. But at the beginning, it is hard to hold one’s balance, to remember that college as a thing-in-itself is trumpery; that it can be exalted only if it be made subservient to personal, spiritual growth.”

“Results, then—you mean—are bad?”

“They’re as bad as rules,” laughed Professor Deering.

This excited Quincy. “How then can you give marks in your classes?”

The Professor looked at him, not with anger as Quincy had feared, after putting this question, but with pleasure. He smiled.

“You haven’t got me there! I must give marks, since our College thinks it must give degrees. But I give the marks only nominally. In my classes, each June, the students hand in to me their own marks—given to themselves in honor and by their personal lights. In that way, I outdo the authorities above me.”

“Does anyone ever flunk himself?”

“It has happened frequently. My practice, moreover, has proved to me how little conceit there really is in youth.” Quincy’s eyes glowed at this. “I have a reputation for very low marking. Of course, it is the men who are responsible. But I never over-ride their judgment, in either extreme.”

“Even if you disagree?”

“Would that be reasonable?” flashed back Professor Deering.

Just then, a man came up and placed his hand on the Professor’s shoulder.

“I’ve been all through the train, looking for you, Deering,” he said. “Didn’t you know we had an extra seat for you in the Pullman? Will you come?”

The Professor smiled as a man does who is found out, once again, in an old foible. Then, he turned politely to his neighbor.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Burt?”

Quincy wished to speak graciously. “Thank you,” he said, with what seemed irrelevance.

The big man nodded seriously—embarrassed at such embarrassment.

He gathered up his coat and his portfolio and trudged away, supporting himself with his massive hands down the corridor of the swinging train.

The time that remained—though the long part of the journey—was brief to Quincy. He now had his seat to himself—and he was doubly glad. For he could have thought of no substitute for Professor Deering who would not have been sacrilege.

What an amazing adventure this had been! Quincy had found strange opinions in books; but to meet them vitally, poignantly in life, to hear them imparted, not to the world, but to him, and to him, not as the humble listener he would willingly have been, but as the equal, the critic, the fellow-thinker! In these things that had actually come to pass should have lain almost ecstasy to Quincy. Yet, he was bewildered at not being more bewildered by them. He could not understand how he was managing, in their light, to contain himself. For it dawned on him that he was taking all these wonders quite calmly, almost as matters-of-course; as if their like had occurred even in fancy, many times before. It seemed they should have dazzled him, flung him into some land where such things belong. And instead, here he was solidly in his seat, while the train rushed on, in full possession of his nature, sturdily, serenely eased with life.

Quincy found himself watching the shoulders, the necks, the heads of two young men who were several seats in front of him. From the tilt of their hats, the cool assurance of their nods, he knew them as upperclassmen. They fascinated him, somehow. They seemed very remote from Professor Deering. They seemed more the expected thing. And always, the expected thing tended to unnerve him, even as the sudden flash of wonder gave him a grip on the realities.

The forward door opened suddenly. There was the inrush of air, the clatter of pounding wheels, the swift slam as the door fell to. Before it, stood a tall, svelte fellow, exuding a smooth confidence. He espied the two men whom Quincy had been watching. Hands went up; names were called warmly. He rushed to them. And with affectionate hand-shakes and stout slaps on shoulders, they gave greeting after the summer’s separation. Then, they began to talk. The svelte newcomer leaned over from the aisle and words flew fast. Evidently, it was the man by the window for whom his words were especially intended. This continued for some time, and then the man directly below him got up. The newcomer protested suavely. Quincy marvelled at such affection and ceremonious courtesy. The man who had arisen evidently assured the other that he would gladly and easily find another seat so that the two might with more comfort impart their urgent news. He stepped away. The newcomer, as quickly and utterfully forgetful as he had been solicitous, slipped into the seat. And he who had given it up came down the aisle and placed himself with Quincy.

They examined each other; Quincy surreptitiously, the upperclassman with a bland impudence. Quincy was thoroughly ill at ease. He turned his face full on the window. And then he heard the man’s voice coming toward him. He was a rather stout, florid fellow with fat lips and eyes that would have been a merry blue had they not turned so hard.

“Goin’ up, first time?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Quincy.

“Where do you come from?”

“New York.”

The man shook his head impatiently. “What prep, I mean.”

“None.” He named his private school.

With unconcealed effrontery, the man looked him over,—his clothes, his hands, his face. At Quincy’s answer, a change had come over the fellow. It was as if the boy had admitted that he was a pauper or an idiot. He had been in a mood for asking questions; Quincy’s admission that he came unlabeled, unclassified, uncounted, put him in a mood for giving advice.

“Well,” said the upperclassman, “you’ll find that your coming in alone will make no difference—” as if his manner had not stultified his words! “This is a democratic place. Every man has as good a chance to make good as another. Prep school prominence wears off by midyears. Don’t let it worry you. Go in for as many activities as you can. You look as if you could run. Can you?”

“Yes,” said Quincy.

“Fine! Go in for track. Go in for the papers, whether you can write or not. Keep a cool head. You got the odds against you, of course, coming in alone. But if you can sprint or tear off funny stories better than the next fellow, you’ll make good, just the same.”

Quincy did not like this man—nor understand him. His words gave him a sense of faintness. He wished to be silent. But his consciousness of the new life made him feel that he must try to understand, even if it did mean a process so painful and disagreeable as the asking of questions. So he nerved himself and spoke:

“What exactly do you mean by ‘making good’?”

The upperclassman smiled with an air of amiable sufferance.

“Getting there, of course,” he said. “Doing something.... You’ll find out soon enough.”

This explanation was very vague to Quincy. He thought perhaps he might help him to explain.

“Do you mean,” he asked, “being elected to a fraternity?”

His neighbor turned upon him with a look of horror in his eyes. He seemed speechless with an inexplicable pain, much as Quincy thought he might be, if some stranger suddenly, gratuitously, should insult his sister. And then, after a pause, the wounded upperclassman spoke.

“Look here!” he said, in a solemn monotone that was suffused with deep emotion. “Do you want to get queered? Shut up about such things; do you understand? Shut up tight!”

The boy sat there, ashamed and helpless as if he had been stripped. He could not get away. He could not defend himself. He could not act as if he had done nothing. He could not apologize. So he merely sat there and faced his tormentor with eyes that had in them both pride and humiliation.

The upperclassman seemed pleased with the result of his gentle warning. He seemed even a little sorry; and it tickled him, doubtless, to entertain so generous a sentiment toward a freshman. He nodded wisely, shook his head as if conscious of the lavish weakness in so kind an attitude, and then got up. The visitor forward, had gone. As he left for his own seat, he turned back to Quincy and bowed.

“My name is Guthridge. I’m a senior. Come and see me, any time. I’ll be glad if I can be of service.” He seemed to be easing himself of a formula as well learned as was his name. Then he left.

Quincy remembered that Professor Deering had not invited him to call. How thrilled and happy that would have made him! And here was an invitation he would have gone far in order to avoid—had there been compulsion of accepting it. There were curious ironies in this new life.

By the time the train-man had shouted out his station and they had rolled, with airy sighings and steely creakings, to a stand-still, these impressions of the new reality were still swirling inchoate, hectically colored, in his head. He was far from having mastered them. He had not yet even faced them. Yet, here it was!

IV

The early bewilderments of college did not wear away. They formed a swirling veil through which the unknown features of his new life seemed glamorous and splendid. The pulsing rhythm of so much youth centered about a point gave college a lilt that did not fail to whirl Quincy with it. For a time, the mere sense of motion suffused his consciousness. He was content.

And then, he understood. A windstorm in a desert is engrossing. But while one dashed off the onslaught of hot sand, sweeping one’s senses, there might still come stirring through the monotone of sting and color the thought of other action, the doubt of this fight’s good. So, now, with Quincy. Life as he knew it had been largely desert. Here was merely a new stormy stretch. But despite this, his longing for somewhat else grew, as the lack went on. His longing was based upon no fact. It was becoming slowly a basis for all future facts.

During the first glamor and the first fright of freshman year, Quincy observed a tone of affability about him in his mates. They, also, were unsure of their position, unsure of the importance of this fellow student, Quincy Burt. And they were cautious. Therefore, they were hospitable, affable. They introduced themselves and asked him to call. Numbers of them called on him. Quincy was touched, excited by this reality of comradeship. But he soon learned that something would rise up, as a barrier, between him and his tentative friends. The feeling of a difference, a gulf of reservation would come upon the onset of an attempt at fellowship. In their talks, these boys seemed to have a definite ideal. And in Quincy’s lack of one, they found an unforgivable distinction. Their ideals were pragmatic and immediate. They referred to foot-ball or to the music-clubs or to golf. It made little difference. But it welded the class together. And it left Quincy out.

A few solicitous fellows told him: “You must try for something. It doesn’t matter if you make a team or not—so long as you try.”

Quincy was too slight for foot-ball. So he “went out” for the track team.

He got the necessary suit and shoes. And he reported.

Quincy had reached full height at seventeen. He was fairly tall, lithe, splendidly loose-knit. His muscles were soft but long. His shoulders were sharp. His neck was thin and he held his head always slightly forward. He looked to be excellent material. The coach selected him for the “220 yard dash,” since he had no pre-conceptions on the matter.

In that first try-out, Quincy won his race. It was a strange and sharp experience for him. Ten panting fellows lined out beside him under the bleak sky. The cold air ate against the heat of his body. He felt free and the feeling gave him a sense almost of shame. He had no right to win that race! As his feet tore ground away, something within him told him to come in second, if need be—but not first! But he was unleashed. He raced with his soul. And he won, as if he had committed an improper act.

The upperclassmen congratulated him. His fellows also, did not seem to think that he had had no right to win. That night at dinner, his every word was respectfully attended. He was consulted upon the effect of cigarettes on “wind.” He was asked how many medals he had won at school. And when he answered that he had never raced before, they smiled with deprecation as if the fact of his nonage had been a boast of supernatural powers.

But in the atmosphere of new impressions, this strange event did not intrude too much. He slept well and early. He began to be troubled by the attentions of his class-mates. A few days later, he ran the “100 yard dash” and won again. He was subjected, now, to very direct attention, at the track house. He was rubbed down, massaged, questioned about his habits. The boys took him for granted. Upon the third day, he was asked in the field if he would try the “440.” He was willing. He finished third in excellent company. This time the captain of the college track team shook his hand.

“Burt, you’re the real thing,” he said. “Now work—! Train! There’s glory for you.”

Quincy got back to his room and discovered that he hated this favor into which he had fallen. He loved to run. He loved to race, although the conspicuousness of winning made him uncomfortable. What he detested was the “business” and the importance that had been attached to a quite natural and unassuming exercise. If it was joy to hurl himself through the air and wind, with his breast atingle and his head aflame, it was torture straightway to be currycombed—mentally and physically—like a race-horse. It was torture to be patronized by a shallow-mouthed senior who, by some insuperable right, was his captain and his mentor. It was torture to be told what to eat, when to rest, how to pace. And it was torture to feel himself engaged, harnessed, to run—whether the mood was there or no.

For a week more, Quincy bore this tyranny to which his prowess had subjected him. And then, calmly, bravely, he quit. He was not aware of the heroism of his act. And to be sure, there was no voice nor mind about him so to paint it. What he had done was cowardly, perverse, vicious and monstrous in the light of this new world. There was no possible alternative in viewpoint.

He had told the captain that he loved to run, but that he did not wish to make sprinting the master of his time and soul. The captain had smiled knowingly.

“I know it’s hard. But you have to, Burt. It’s the way.”

“Well—I’d rather not.”

The captain looked at him sharply. “You got to, I say!”

“How do you mean—I got to?”

“You can’t keep on a team and not practice every day. And not train all the time.”

And the man had walked off, not dreaming of a further protest.

Quincy, then, came close to the truth. There was something sacred, almost prayerful in running. It was the service of the trees and brooks. The strain of his muscles, the pant of his breath, the burn of his eyes, the hewing-down by this fleet spirit within him of the world’s resistances, came to him as romance, as worship. And to yoke this splendor to an affair of points and team-work seemed sacrilege. He could run when he wished. He had now learned the glory of that. He would not prostitute his best delight.

He broke training and failed to report.

The captain called on him. There was a stormy half-hour, in which the captain showed his native lights and talked much of treachery to one’s college. And so, Quincy was queered.

At the fall fraternity elections, he was left out. He knew that he had been marked for slaughter. The majority of his class now evinced nervousness at talking to him. They had fallen off as quickly as they had first rushed to accept him. He had committed the unpardonable sin. He stood there, in their midst, as a rebuke to their standards and activities—as an individual—as one who prized his pleasure and rejected the college shibboleth of “doing something.” There was no health in him. And there was danger of being associated with him, if one were seen too much about with him. Elections came. And Quincy, courageous as he had been in the lists of decision, was too young to smile and too weak not to suffer.

But a firm idea had been implanted in his soul; and a great gift given it. Each afternoon now, in the days that came before the snow, and while he should have been sprinting for his Alma Mater, he went out in the sparse woods beyond the field and ran and raced with his own spirit. This was the gift that had been given him. The idea was one of criticism. He began to see the poverty of this college scope, to deplore the lack of a real, free romanticism in its routine and aspirations. He longed for the opportunity to talk with Professor Deering. But the Professor taught only upperclassmen.

And then, Quincy thought of expressing his idea more vicariously. He worked a week on an essay that he entitled “College Cramps.” In it, he made reference to the grip of college routine and business on all the native energies of youth that should run wild; to the effort through team-work and club-work, to channel ebullience into a trough where college gods—cattle of iron and wood—could drink and guzzle. He sent his essay to the college literary magazine. It was sent back. Across the title page a witty editor had scribbled: “We’re sorry you have them, old man.”

Then the boy retouched his essay and mailed it to Professor Deering. Within, he enclosed a note stating that it had been rejected by the college paper. He hoped, however, that it would be read by the man who really had inspired it.

He heard nothing from Professor Deering. And soon after, he made a momentous journey to New York. But before this, he had found a friend.

V

His name was Garsted—Simon Garsted.

One day, Quincy crossed the campus with him. He had been a slight ways behind. He had overtaken Quincy.

“Aren’t you Burt of the freshman class?” he asked, introducing himself. He was a junior—an obscure one as far as college honors were concerned.

“I was at a tea, last Sunday, at Professor Deering’s house,” Garsted explained. “He read your paper aloud.”

“Did he?”

For a moment, Quincy was rejoiced. And then it occurred to him that Mr. Deering might have acknowledged the paper’s receipt—if he had thought so highly of it—might have asked his permission about reading it aloud. So Quincy withdrew into his shell. And since only Garsted was there, congratulating him, he turned his resentment upon him.

“I hope you liked it,” he said icily.

“You’re a mighty independent young chap, Burt,” Garsted went on, “I like that.”

“Thanks.”

Garsted stopped, causing Quincy to do likewise and to face him. And then, he smiled.

“Look here, Burt,” he said softly, “Deering’s a strange, sloppy man. But he’s the biggest man here. Don’t take what he did amiss. If I know him, he forgot even to invite you to his tea. That’s just like him. One day, when his interest in your paper is a bit subsided, he’ll recall that there’s more to you than it—that you’re behind it. Then he’ll drop you a note. Meantime, however, don’t be sensitive—with him.”

There was a pause. Quincy was looking a trifle sheepish. Garsted was laughing: “Save your sensitiveness for other things, Burt—and come and see me.” He put out his hand.

Quincy inclined his head slightly and as their hands clasped their eyes met. Garsted caught the deep pathos of this boy, lost and alone in a college campus. He felt a thrill as one does at some beautiful flash of thought. He saw the contrast between this silent, stubborn boy and the easy obviousness of the things about him.

“Let me see,” he said in a still more quiet tone, “these indefinite invitations are insulting.” It was the second time he had caught the cause of Quincy’s trouble. “What about a date to-night? Can you come?”

Quincy looked at him. The first general wave of invitations, and that succeeding flood when he was harnessed to the track team, had died utterly away. He had been alone for three weeks. He was sensitive and he was skeptical. But Garsted was different. And it was hard to transfer upon him so sustainedly his irritation at Mr. Deering. Garsted was a close-set fellow. His head was long, almost ponderous, with coarse, blond, short-cropped hair. His nose was massive, angularly chiseled, his mouth was broad and showed a row of teeth immaculately white and separate one from the other. All of him seemed roughly hewn out of some stubborn stone—abrupt, big, yet anomalously delicate. As he spoke, he stammered at the beginning of each sentence; but once over this initial barrier, he went on freely, until the pause.

“I have nothing on, to-night.”

“Very well,” said Garsted. “Come at six. There’s my dorm. Room number ten.” He pointed, and dashed off.

Quincy had never seen such a room as this. Through a maze of tobacco smoke, a naked gas-jet gave out its light. Garsted, in suspenders, loomed out of the shadows, looking like some grotesque statue, his hair dishevelled, a cigarette dropping from his lips. “Hello. Come in,” he said without a sign of stammering.

Quincy felt his way into the room. It was long and low. It had three leaded lattice windows. Above one was the gas-jet. On the full wall was a suspended book-case, littered with manuscripts, papers and exotic-looking volumes. Below, was a cot, unmade; and lost in the heterogeneous bed-clothes were trousers, books, two hats and a carelessly flung fiddle. Below the two other windows was a plain kitchen table, unvarnished and bewilderingly strewn with hodge-podge of small things. Beside a pen was a tooth-brush. Mingled with clean sheets of paper were pipes, neckties and a pile of silver change. In one corner stood an antiquated typewriter. Garsted seemed splendidly at home and in a key with all this harmonious medley.

He flung three paper volumes from a chair to the floor and offered the seat to Quincy. Quincy took it. Garsted rolled a cigarette, lighted it from the gas and suggested that they dine at the town’s most expensive restaurant. Then, he looked down at his shoes.

“Damn it,” he said with a chuckle, “they’ll never do.” He excused himself and went out into the hall, leaving the door ajar behind him.

“Oh, Bobby! Oh, Bobby!” he sang out. A door opened.

“Going fussing to-night?” cried Garsted.

“No,” came the distant voice.

“Let me have your good shoes?”

There were more footsteps above. Presently, Quincy heard Garsted at the bottom of the stairs catch one shoe and muff the second. Then, he entered and without comment pulled off his own, tossed them under the kitchen-study table and put on the others.

“I’m hungry; let’s go,” said Garsted, moving toward the door.

“Should I put out the light?” said Quincy, who was behind him.

“Lord, no! I never have any matches. I’d have to go to bed in the dark.” And still more Quincy marvelled. Gas had to be paid for, in the college dormitories.

The waiters in the town’s most expensive restaurant (the only one with metropolitan prices) treated Simon Garsted as if he had lived in a mansion. They judged by the sort of dinner he ordered and his taste in wine. Garsted made it a rule not to enter the place save his purse was full. Also, in order that this might not be too infrequently, he would go long without good nourishment, subsisting on coffee, tobacco and free lunch. Another of his economies was in matches.

However, it was a memorable evening for Quincy. He did not pretend to understand. He was subtle enough to be dazzled as much by the incident of the borrowed shoes as by the salaams of the headwaiter. He saw a dizzy accomplishment in either. He liked Garsted, besides admiring him. He found it easy to converse with him. And Garsted proved his entire comfort by not stammering once after the oysters.

They talked long. Quincy discovered in himself ideas—and ideas, in addition, to which an evidently brilliant upperclassman was glad to listen. He found that many of his host’s spicily couched remarks were final forms of feelings he had long vaguely nursed. And, being human, he respected Garsted for this reason as well as for another.

There were, moreover, many points in his new friend’s mind that had never occurred, even remotely, to the boy. Most of these, as Garsted made them, seemed bewilderingly true. Others, he argued frantically, unaware that he was in this way defending his old grounds, his old spiritual habits.

It was obvious from the outset that Garsted was a rebel. He told him so.

“Well, so are you,” retorted the older man. And this was news to Quincy.

“Why, that’s anarchism!” cried Quincy, when Garsted was inveighing against the theoretic right of imprisonment for crime.

“And what was your leaving the track team?” came the quick rejoinder.

So, by this penetrating means the boy gained insight into himself. Small wonder, then, that he found himself growing enthusiastically fond of Garsted. There is no commoner cause, among the honest, for devoted friendships.

No middle way exists in natures like that of Quincy. Once they let go their blanketing reserve, they feel no shame in nakedness. They have not learned a technique of graded confidence. They withhold everything with a single grip. They know only how to maintain that grip or to release it. They lack experience in the nuances of human correlations. Their rule is not to adventure. When they break it—since it is so sincere a rule—they break it utterly. For behind the rule, is the great, incessant need of what the rule forbids—the conviction that in such intensity of need abstinence is good.

Quincy flung his reserves out from him, that evening. And Garsted had no reason to dream that this candid boy could be as secretive as a cat. He sat high up in his chair, haled by his wine, receiving Quincy’s brave opinions with an equal gusto. His own remarks served to expose and annotate them. Garsted had a genius in apt conversation. He knew when to obtain a major effect by playing obbligato. Quincy’s purposes and judgments were put forth acridly, naked, crudely, as seventeen years are wont. Had the boy heard himself as he actually spoke, he must have felt the strident immaturity of his opinions, been rebuffed by them and so reacted against Garsted. But here, this young man’s cleverness came out. As Quincy’s thoughts ran, Garsted dressed them, trimmed them, softened them. Such was the mission of his own accompanying remarks. And in consequence of this, Quincy’s impressions were not of his ideas alone, but of these tempered and glorified by his host’s part. So Quincy glowed with a strange assurance. And his subliminal gratitude for Garsted inspired a conscious admiration.

They parted late.

Quincy lay, stare-eyed, in bed; and by fancy continued his past conversation, until sleep cheated him. Even so, a young knight of old, fresh from a first tourney, might over and over again have fought in vision, stroke by stroke, the battle he had won.

One of the remarks of Simon Garsted had been responsible for Quincy’s journey to New York. The boy had claimed the years he lived there as credentials of his knowledge of the city.

“But your family’s been there with you, all that time?” asked Garsted.

“Of course.”

“Then you know less of New York than the immigrant who lands at South Ferry from Ellis Island. He at least has been receptive to the real welcome—attack, if you will. With you, inevitably, the home you lived in and the hordes of people you knew must have interfered.”

Quincy smiled at these “hordes.” But he resolved to meet New York without the fact or reservation of his family within his mind.

Garsted had summarized: “Knowing a city is being open to the vibrance of its crowds and buildings. A family stops these apertures.”

The time was early in November. Fraternity elections had just placed a mark upon Quincy’s lack of favor. They had thrown him into a gloom. But what really harassed the boy was not the disapproval of his class, so much as the palpable weakness which he read into the fact that this had troubled him. This was the source of real misgivings. If he was what he was, had done with conscience that which he had done, the results should have been powerless to distress him. They were not. His unpopularity, now brutally concreted, gave him periods of despond. And seeing this, he rebelled at his own self-styled fatuity and thereby fixed his mood.

It was in such a mood that he set out to meet New York. The thrill of real adventure shot through him as he stepped forth, under these new auspices, upon the crashing street. The power of suggestion had availed. It seemed indeed as if he had never before known the great city.

He plunged at once into the subway and alighted at Brooklyn Bridge. There had been no plan in this. But it had seemed the natural tendency. Quincy had merely flowed along. Here was one channel of the city’s life that had happened to catch him in. Since he was there to invite and to enhance this receptivity, it would have been wrong to choose.

So Quincy reached the street from the subway. At once, he was washed along like a splinter of wood on a rising wave, into a screaming welter of humanity and trolley-cars. He was in the terminal whence soars the incline pathway rising to the Manhattan Tower of Brooklyn Bridge.

It was not yet four o’clock. And the sparse stream of early hurriers about him was as nothing against his feeling of solitude. He recalled almost vaguely now the packed recesses whence he had emerged—the delirium of cars churning the crowds, the hammer of the outlying city.

Before him swept the bridge. He felt that every cable of the web-like maze was vibrant with stress and strain. With these things he was alone. Yet he felt no insecurity, such as the crowds inspired. Beyond, through the net-work of steel, huddled Brooklyn. And below his very feet, tumbled together as if some giant had tipped the city eastward and sent all the houses pell-mell toward the down-tilted corner, lay the wharves and slums of Manhattan. It seemed to Quincy that he was being caught upon a monstrous swing and swept with its pulsed lilt above the grovelling life of the metropolis. Suddenly, the fancy flashed upon him that from his perch of shivering steel the power should indeed come to poise and judge the swarm above which he rocked. The bridge that reeled beyond him seemed an arbiter. It bound the city. It must know the city’s soul since it was so close to the city’s breath. In its throbbing cables there must be a message. In its lacings and filigrees of steel, there must be subtle words!...

He was already above the river. The sun was cold. The waters of the harbor cut out like sapphire fretted with gleam. Beyond, Brooklyn was in shadow—shadow that sprang rather from its nature than the sun’s lack. Quincy turned north where the great East Side crowded out under two bridges, stifling the river to an inlet. The city rose in a blue haze. Quincy recalled the words of the man in the Park: “Blue’s her color.” It was all like the piled ascent of some brobdingnagian ant-hill. He scrutinized it carefully,—from the stall-like wharves to the tower, turreted and carved in ice at the hill’s crest. It seemed ugly. And yet, as his eyes went back over the mazy whole, down from the notched skyline to the turmoiled streets that fell brown and grey into the water, it seemed beautiful as well. Quincy was puzzled. He did not know that in this flaunting grandeur, building from myriad misery and ugliness, lay the nature of New York.

Quincy too was cold. Instinctively, he turned south. The sun was very ineffectual against the lower city with its escarpments of wrought stone. There was a cruelty about these that laughed at the falling sun. The tall buildings were ugly—fearfully so. They lacked grace and color. One of them was a titanic telescope done in cake and sugar. A huge structure farther north—ridiculous with a flounce as a flank and its tiny turrets—reminded him of building-blocks. And this brought to Quincy the idea of giant babies, sportively responsible for it all. But there was tragedy as well as farce. The vaster buildings rose all white and impervious and cool from the wallow of unlit mediocrity below. Monsters indeed, they seemed to have sucked the strength for rising from the nondescript ruck that they submerged. Ferocious, sapping prodigies they seemed, now, to Quincy—the sort to which men are sacrificed and that make slaves of their creators.

All of this was like the blow of a mailed fist to the boy. It made him turn toward Brooklyn. The borough of homes appeared shabby and foul, a neglected step-sister unworthy the name of Cinderella. For here was no virtue under the spell of persecution. Brooklyn also was sinister enough. Merely, she had been less successful. Homes, evidently, counted little.

Suddenly, Quincy found that he had left the bridge and was standing upon a street in Brooklyn. He struck down its dingy length. He wondered if the wealth that had raised all the glories he had just observed was in some manner parent to this squalor. For not more than fifteen minutes, he searched the swart, hovelled depths below the Bridge. He saw a ferry-boat at the foot of a street, relieved with plants and romping boys, which had been turned into a consumptives’ home. He was not used to stinking court-ways, houses that leered, rank saloons advertising rum and sidewalks crumbling with neglect. He looked up at the span of bridge. It seemed an unattainable pathway. His nerves told him he would be better looking down at Brooklyn. So he returned.

The whole world had become another world in half an hour. Quincy surveyed the sky, the river, distant Manhattan. It came to him with a thrill that nothing was the same—that everything was radically something else. It was night—boldly, suddenly, entirely. If New York had a tongue of its own, would there be a word in it for evening?

What impressed Quincy at once was that night was not falling, as poetry books would have it, but ascending; and ascending, not in a steady advance like the shadows on a mountain, but in sudden starts, in impulsive sallies, like clouds of guerilla warriors pressing up, free of each other, repulsed here, there held at bay, and here again triumphant.

In the north, Manhattan was already dark. It loomed up, loftier yet more subdued in mist that was forever turning thicker and more sombre. Not a light pierced the haze to Quincy’s eye. He seemed now to be looking down upon an illimitable graveyard. Each house was become a tomb-stone, each towering building, in the light of day a sentinel of progress, appeared now a monument to some great death. Below the liquid green of the two uptown bridges, the East River was opaque amethyst, streaked here and there where some boat had cut a swathe. The moiling tenements glowed forth like coral. Poverty, catching a deflected ray, turned lurid.

Now, as he marched on, Quincy observed the south. The arm of Liberty, wisp-like in the mist, pointed to a blood-orange ball of sun. The nearer island lay in a deeper purple; its trees waved through a thicker film. But the waters were in shadow as if night had been an emanation from them, pushing the sun relentlessly back across the rim of the world. Above the harbor, was a deep pall, night’s advance guard in its grey, the sun’s resistance in its orange fretting. The pall fell and the waters grew more brackish. The sun plunged down against the mists, pouring a frenzy of disparted color that shot about the buildings of South Manhattan. And now, a sheet of gold cloud came underneath it. Slowly, yet visibly, the gold turned to yellow, to lemon, to silver—and went grey. Steeped as if in its own blood, the sun sank through the mists, and disappeared.

Quincy shuddered as if he had been witness to a tragedy. Then, huddled in his coat, he pressed on toward Manhattan.

The lower buildings had receded into shadow. The upper turrets were still shooting white against a shrill blue sky. Below, Manhattan was retreating; in the higher line, it still advanced. Quincy thought that the tall buildings slanted forward, that they must topple into the river. And throughout the long expanse, came streaks of smoke, all pointing north, all twining with harmonious measure into the sky.

But now, was the most startling change of all. The phalanx of white smoke seemed to hesitate, broke and scattered. With the sun had gone the wind; and with it, given up to the play of a thousand lesser currents, the smoke eddied forth, curled back and reverted in formless disarray.

Then, with a flash, Quincy was aware of a glitter of lights along the precipice. They were everywhere—huge bars of them in the north, clusters of them in the south. The lights of a city do not come out, one by one. A moment before, he had not noticed any. This, however, Quincy did remark: at first the lights appeared faint, almost fancied within the clear eminence of buildings. But by degrees, the lights, thickening in numbers, grew as well in strength, became more real and more brilliant. In measure, the cold outline of stone against the blue melted and merged; the two values—sky and building—fell back into one wash of grey. And the lights took firmer form in their dimming casements, and gleamed forth like a new city of flame in place of the city of stone. Manhattan of the day, with its sharp, cruel outlines and its clumsy angles, hostile to subtlety and to suggestion, was fading utterly before this faëry Manhattan with its swarms of color and its deep store of fancy.

Quincy fought his way to the street through the frantic turbulence of clattering cars and thronging home-goers. He felt as if he had been dropped down the muddy vortex of a whirlpool. Night was thick above him. Great clouds of people swirled toward the bridge and subway, amid the clangor of traffic and the cacophony of newsboys.

Bruised, frightened, Quincy turned away, eager only to escape. Suddenly, amazement stopped him. Across the dismal mouth of the street was the bridge—a giant causeway. One arc-light underneath broke off a circlet of yellow-white from the surrounding gloom. Above shone a ragged strip of sky. The air was rank. The solitary light tumbled and flashed in the vapors.

Panic clutched the boy. There seemed a half uttered charm about this place. He pressed on. And now, he slipped along the wet walks of Fulton Market where the fish of a thousand pushcarts had dropped blood and ooze during the day. Facing the low, red houses with the hectic, gas-burning shops, Quincy observed Broadway beyond—a long, high gauze of flame. Ponderous trucks rattled past. And a thin stream of drab humanity shuffled toward the ancient ferry that plies to Brooklyn.

Quincy went north on South Street, past the swinging doors of saloons and shops where marling-spikes and flag-trucks made display. Under the Bridge itself he went—looming above him like a curse; and into the rookeries of Cherry Hill.

Quincy had had enough. He was frightened, horrified.

He pushed up Water Street and westward, eager above all to escape the omnipresent Bridge. He passed through fetid piles of tenement, pouring their produce into the street. Crowds jostled him; cars clashed; machines went braying, shuttling. The taste of New York was bitter on his lips. Through its sheer bulk, it threatened to submerge him. He wished to run, in order to be rid of it. But he held himself back. He must be calm, courageous. All of this delirium, this lurid show of filth and vice and an inexplicable beauty—was it not life? Would he avoid life, would he be rid of it? Was he not of it? was he not also life?

And so, aching in his soul, for his experience, yet aware deeply that he had somehow been visiting himself, Quincy reached the station and journeyed back to college.

The depth of the impression of this trip on Quincy was such that he did not begin really to know it until somewhat later. Great shocks often compound a spiritual bath which takes a long time to soak upon the nerves. Quincy’s experience, as he looked back on it, was in the nature of a shock—a physical one. It grew blurred, dimensionless within his mind. And in proportion, grew the mental reflex. It seemed now, to Quincy, that the vagueness of what he had encountered was his own subjective vagueness; as if indeed he had pried into the arcana of existence. Of course, such a venture into truth could not have the petty clarity of fact. He learned that a glance within himself gave just such dim results. Yet here, dimness did not detract from poignancy. And so, with New York. There was a firm analogy between these delvings; and between their consequences, at first elusive, physical, and finally outspreading into an aura of deep importance.

He spoke freely of all this to Garsted.

“Why,” asked Garsted, “do you fail to divorce the sense of beauty from even the vilest thing you saw?”

“That I can’t understand,” said Quincy.

“You don’t seem to know what the sense of beauty means.”

“Let me see if I can figure it out.” Quincy knit his brow, and his blue eyes softened. It was as if he had spiritually relaxed, instinctively aware that in this way one can receive.

“Perhaps,” he groped on, “perhaps, when I feel beauty, I am really feeling a sense of welcome. A welcome of the spirit.”

“Good!” cried Garsted. “And when do we welcome? Now, look out for your answer! No sentimentalism. Hypothetically, we welcome when we are charitable, altruistic, Christian. But actually—”

“When we want, I guess.”

“We feel a sense of welcome, when we feel a sense of one-ness. Is that not so? Well—now we’re at the kernel. Beauty is nothing but a sense of welcome within, that we transfer onto an object, because the impulse of life is to transfer. A sense of harmony, in other words.”

“A sense of harmony with filthy hovels and cruel skyscrapers!”

“Absolutely. Something in them is in you,—is truth. You feel that vaguely, through the filth and the stolen decoration. And you call all of it beautiful.”

“Why,” laughed Quincy, “you make me think I was paying a visit to myself, in extension.”

“Well, what else gripped you? Was it the architecture?”

They laughed together. And then, in the silence, the boy pondered.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “I felt it also,—that I had been looking into myself. Now, I can do more than feel it—thanks to you; I can express it.” He paused.

“The devil! Then all these brutalities and contrasts and flauntings are truth? And they’re in me, also—at least, what makes them be!”

“Don’t you also belong to the world?”

Quincy looked sharply at his friend. This question moved him. He thought of his life, so far. He thought of the havoc which even this little glimpse of the world had played with him. He grew sombre and his eyes lost their liquid glow of relaxation.

“Something’s wrong,” he said solemnly. “If I belong to the world, there’s that within me objects to it. It cries out, objecting. It felt the beauty, that day. And, as you say, that meant that it recognized a fellowship, a harmony. But it hurt, Garsted,—it hurt like being crushed!”

Garsted laughed—alone. He could go only a certain way with Quincy. This seemed jejune sensitiveness.

From the moment of that laughter, the boy discovered that there were things and states about which it was unwise to talk, even in the rare circumstance of being able to.

VI

One day, on the street, Quincy saw Professor Deering. Quincy was hurt at the Professor. He was in a mood for a cold bow that would leave its mark. But the big man stopped him and talked the mood away in cordiality.

“Mr. Burt—I am ashamed of myself,” he smiled wanly. “There have been worries and they have made me rude. Walk me home, now, will you?”

Quincy followed tacitly at his side.

“I was very grateful for that paper,” went on the Professor. “I gave Snowdon of the Monthly a piece of my mind for rejecting it. But tell me, how are you?”

“I am getting on, thank you, Professor Deering.”

“That is as it should be. I am glad to hear it. I wasn’t so sure of you, you see.”

Quincy’s heart sank. It was as if he had been found out, as if a guilt had been fixed on him. Yet, he knew that the Professor’s words tokened merely respect and an unusual interest.

The Professor went on: “You evidently have qualities of rebellion, Mr. Burt. If you have the strength to support what these qualities will always bring you, I have no fear for you. But it is more common to revolt than to support what revolt sets up.”

“I’m all right, Mr. Deering,” Quincy replied; “I am not in the least worried. I am having a bully time.”

“Will you come in just a few minutes? It is tea hour.”

Quincy hesitated clumsily; grew aware of his awkwardness, and agreed, in order to conceal it.

They were before the Deering House. It looked very like a big, paste-board box, dropped directly upon the street by some careless errand-boy. There was no lawn before it. Two low steps led to a tiny porch, scarcely wider than the door, yet big enough for two banks of flower-pots. These were now barren and frozen. The house was of white frame and square. The two windows of the façade seemed to have been punched upon it as an afterthought.

Mr. Deering unlocked the door and Quincy was led across a narrow hall into the library. The room was spacious and bare. The center table had no cover; the three windows had no curtains; the walls were entirely occupied with plain book-racks, the height of the ceiling. A wood fire burned in the hearth, before which lay a tiger skin. This touch of Oriental glamor in the room’s prim contour stood out. With the exception of one upholstered arm-chair, the furniture was plain. Domestic rugs pieced out the soft-wood floor. There was a small gas stove in the corner of two book shelves. On it were a pewter kettle, several cups and a decanter of spirits.

“Sit down, and let me brew you some tea,” said Mr. Deering.

Quincy complied. “This is where you work?”

“Yes. When I close the doors, I am in an inviolable castle.”

The boy remarked that on the center table lay a low pile of unused papers, a single pen and, in the corner, a small rack containing half a dozen books. Even the table seemed impoverished and empty. No artistic wealth of abandon was about it. Meantime, Professor Deering was boiling water.

“You must come here often, Mr. Burt,” he spoke as he leaned over the little table.

Quincy liked the massive stretch of his back, the wide, high head poised gracefully upon a short, thick neck and closely covered, like a cap, with hair.

During the process of tea-soaking there was no further talk. The host seemed absorbed. The guest had naught to say. But now, after the perfunctory questions relative to sugar and brandy and lemon, Mr. Deering came forward with two cups. He made Quincy move to the hearth and sat down beside him.

“Mr. Burt,” he said, stirring his tea, into which Quincy observed that he had poured a plentiful quantity of cognac, “I am anxious to get to know you. I want to hear if you have any plans.”

He questioned the boy about his courses; he asked for candid views of text-books and instructors. He got them. It never occurred to Quincy that the chance of their meeting might seem in contradiction to Professor Deering’s interest. There was about the man an impressionistic note that made harmonious this chance renewal of their acquaintance. Everything about the room, from the kettle to the curtainless windows, suggested a free, airy impressionism. The tidy desk with its bare batch of papers, also. Professor Deering appeared to need about him a liberal space, unhampered and untrammeled by pre-conceptions or too much furniture whatsoever, be it in the physical or the ideal world. Thus only, his creative mind was able to career. So it was natural that a very real result should come of a quite impromptu meeting. Wherefore, Quincy did not restrain himself.

Of a sudden there was a knock. Mr. Deering clattered his tea-cup nervously and arose. A woman had made open the door without waiting for a signal.

“Oh, excuse me, Lawrence,” she said. But at the same time, she stepped inside. And Quincy heard her excuse as if it had been ironical.

Mr. Deering stood strangely embarrassed, his weight thrown back so as to give him an air of difficult balance.

“Julia—this is Mr. Burt. My wife—” he added.

“May I speak to you, one moment, Lawrence? I am sure Mr. Burt will excuse you.”

The big man hesitated again, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Then, he went forward without turning to Quincy and the door shut behind the pair. Quincy had remarked that the embarrassment was all with Mr. Deering. His wife had scarce deigned to nod to him. But now that he was alone for a few moments, he had the chance to bring to consciousness the impression he had had of her.

He recalled her as a slender, supple figure, framed in the doorway. Her eyes were very bright and dark, her chin was long and seemed to point protrusively. She wore a waist of dull blue silk that draped loose from her shoulders. These were narrow and high. Above the dull blue gleamed in his vision that black mass of her hair. Two great coils of it stood out, disordered, above her ears. A curve was low over the flat, cool forehead. He remembered that she was pale and that just below her eyes the blood shone strangely in two flecks through her delicate, hard skin. Also, her hands were large. And tight sleeves drew out the thinness of her arms. She seemed to have the bosom of a boy.

Now, the door opened. The silence of the hall whence Mr. Deering stepped back beside him, taking up his tea-cup, brought out a memory of her voice. It had been low and vibrant. Quincy thought, without too great awareness why, of a velvet casing over a silver knife. Then, Mr. Deering continued the conversation.

In a few minutes, Quincy, with a poise that himself was stranger to, arose and left.

He admired Professor Deering for having so beautiful a wife. Then, she was beautiful—this Julia Deering, whose first name he had not lost? It occurred to him that she had been very beautiful indeed, framed there, in the doorway....

VII

Now came the Christmas vacation.

A time of ill-suppressed anticipation in a college town. Spirits soar and marks descend. Men laugh more readily; kindness comes to the surface of expression. Charity and self-indulgence, disguised as a fine denial conscious of its temporary being, give life a buoyancy. Energy juts into the future, leaving the swamp of deserted channels for the present. Eyes and mind and above all, the softer sense, wait upon the morrow. There is an abstinence about, as of guests before a feast not quite ready to begin.

And then, the last day, the last hour. The swift march of feet bedecking the frozen station road like flowers. The ring of voices in prospect and good wish, fretting the grey air like tendrils of warm sun. The mad largess to drivers; the luxury of lugging fat valises; the display of bright neckwear and urban suits. There may be slush and ice on the station road-way, but there is spring in the feet that tread it.

Quincy, also, went home for his Christmas vacation. He was one of the few that felt these things about him. Most were in these things, making their sum. He was outside, so he felt and understood. The glitter and ring grew and transformed in him, as he forsook them. Things spiritual too, however fair, have shadows, when they stand within the flood of some subjective sun. So stood these bright things to Quincy’s spirit. Their shadows broadened upon him. And they made him gloomy; for the shadow, even of a painted picture, will be dark.

When he reached New York, with home before him, he smiled ironically to himself. The grey loom from the past brightness was wide across him. He bethought himself that he was going jerkily, obtusely, through a set of motions meaning nothing to him. He was partaking of a ceremony without its spirit. It was a deep and pregnant ritual for these others—home turned host, home in a roseate smile and at attention. So much the hollower did its successive rhythms sound in his own emptiness. For without the promise of felicity, what is baptism but an untimely wetting? Yet, he was caught within this process and with one speed, one exterior, he had been lifted up and hurried homeward. If he lacked knowledge of his own direction, he saw the pomp of promise of the others. And in this combination, his spirits fell and his eyes and lips grew subtly vagrant, as if they had desired to escape from the pain whereof his face was symbol.

A home of prophets would have understood this boy’s distress, launched on them at the set, rigid hour of vacation. But in his home if he came upon it as he was now, journeying uptown, the sullen silence would be received as if the mark were already known, shrugged at with the sole possible comment that one had hoped for college to have bettered him. All this, as well, Quincy understood.

So, as he rang the bell, he feared already his reception. And knowing what its consequence must be, he shut down his mood. He found a smile, inspired by his fear. It was perhaps a meagre smile. But its source was not a common one for cheerfulness. And at this moment, he had no other source.

In this way, he entered.

Many things in the Christmas fortnight served to move Quincy out of himself upon a vantage-point where self might be envisaged.

All of it was a Pattern to him, once it was behind. And in the process of its unfolding, he was the unit that recurred persistently within it. He was the dark part of the design: richly, suavely black. About him fell burstings of color, scatteredly composed and half drawn toward him, as if a slightly stronger force prevailed against the colors’ impulse to fly clear. The whole was restless. The dark center-part—himself—seemed strangely unmoved. It was Quincy’s first intensive lesson in the design of spirit—that mad craftsman who hurls strident clashings into a harmony so fluent that all the world, if one step back and look, falls to a monochrome.

There was no distinguishable episode, at first. His strollings in New York, lit by his own fluttering lights far more than by the city’s screaming incandescence, made no chapter apart. His family was there, all-swerving in its crowd-way: Rhoda with her flagrant and acid beauty; Marsden the oracle; Adelaide the unformidable sphinx; his mother, lacking a motor to her sentiments, beyond the power to clap her hands painfully about his ears; his father with his language of greed; the city with its tongue of brass. But the two weeks were one. And the shadow of college was within them,—indivisible like any shadow, so that our minds alone and not our senses know it for a projection.

The Pattern’s early form was allied with the city....

There was a great tongue of metal that had sharp, cutting edges. It struck against tooth and palate with ironic clangor. The teeth were cold buildings, and the lips about which the metal tongue drew blood were the pervasive helpless passions of the city’s life. In reality, the soft and suffering things were hidden and the metal shone. In his impression, the agony stood out and the element which cut and punished seemed insidiously hid. This inversion his own wish explained. He yearned for optimism. He still had strong within him the essential touch of a gay nature, made for a gay God. Perhaps, since such inversions are a part of wit, the gay God was the merrier for this.

Out of the mouth came speech. Rhoda had Julia Deering as a refrain. There was a rhyming sequence between his father and the Professor. Adelaide was at once a low refrain and an epigram that bit under a soft semblance. Strangely, his mother figured little by herself. But her part was never lacking. She had the ubiquity of intonation.

His impressions crystallized, drew back into actual events. But these events from which logically his impressions had gained life seemed a tracing not to a former, but to a later thing. The Pattern was clear in Quincy’s mind before the events were clear, that caused it.

Above all, there was an afternoon, spent in her room with Adelaide.

“If you have time, Quint,” she had said to him on the first evening after his arrival, “I hope we’ll see something of each other.”

“I have no engagements, Adelaide.”

So, when the time came: “Shall we just talk, this once?” she asked him.

They went up to her room.

It had been “Rhoda’s room” when the two sisters shared it. But Rhoda had been married nearly a year. Yet, the old name and the old association clung to Quincy as they arose from luncheon—Marsden, Adelaide, his mother and himself.

“Well, children, I must run.” Sarah looked at her daughter. “It wouldn’t hurt you, Adelaide, to come along and help your mother.” It was a case of belated Christmas shopping—gifts Sarah had overlooked.

“Mother, Quint and I have planned a cozy afternoon upstairs in my room.”

Sarah gazed tragically at the window. The sleet pounded against it like a snare-drum. She had discovered lately that Adelaide was very prone to make a sanctuary in her room. She had to say something. This inspired her.

“And what would you have done, if Rhoda were still here with you?” she asked.

“But she isn’t, Mother.”

“Perhaps,” judged Marsden, opening a book, “it is only fair Adelaide should have some benefit out of her loss of Rhoda.”

“Oh, very well, I’ll go alone,” Sarah shifted her point, with unconscious agility. And once more she observed the storm, as if she had been called upon to brave it. “Let your Mother go alone in the snow.”

“I’ll help you into the machine, Mama,” said Quincy. This irritated Sarah. The mention of the car lessened the woman’s heroism in braving such a storm to gladden a few more forgotten hearts. And what right had a son to deprive a woman of her heroism, whom wealth had deprived already of her less far-fetched qualities?

But at last, Sarah got off. As Marsden settled in his splendid chair, he smiled quizzically at Adelaide, left alone with him for a minute.

“What are you going to talk about?” he asked.

The girl looked at her brother. He was nearly twenty-seven. His grey eyes lay light and remote in the dark, unhealthy folds of his skin. She looked at them. And they seemed unrelated to her brother. Her brother was the cripple. The curl of his lips, the morbid delicacy of his greying hair, the eternal pain that pinched his brow—these were her brother; and the words that the curled lips had spoken. But those remote, grey eyes! They were fair and bright and beckoned eerily. Adelaide could not understand them. She could understand and answer only her brother, the cripple. And at him, for his words, she was angry.

“What do you think?” she retorted.

“It’s beyond thought,” his mouth said. “To know what you will have to say to Quincy would require inspiration.”

“Speak out,” his eyes asked her.

“Pooh!” She scowled and was silent.

But in the silence, this mystery of one to whom she lived so close came uncomfortably nigh. She preferred the cynic-cripple, though his tongue did sear her. He, at least, might be answered or escaped. She went upstairs wondering why the ties of family were so strangely false, why they solved so little and why, since they gave so little, they should demand so much. It did not occur to her that the ties of family were ties of least effort, glutton ties, carnal ties. It did not occur to her that the tuft of white soul within her must revolt, by its very nature, against a law that hallowed such! Adelaide was not strong enough to let things like that occur to her. She merely wondered and went upstairs.

Quincy examined the books on the table, though they had not changed in four months; nor in six. He scrutinized the pictures on the walls; he examined a cheap photograph, in an elaborate ivory frame, of Sylvia who had died the winter he was born. He resented, unconsciously, his sister’s perpetuation of this traditional child. His mother could be forgiven for dwelling on Sylvia and Josiah junior. But Adelaide had no excuse. Somewhere within the boy, a recollection must have smouldered of how his father had reckoned up his own unwelcome birth with the death of his two favorites. But this childish embryon of memory had grown, from the boy’s own rationalization, into a distrust of so sheerly sentimental an attachment as must be Adelaide’s for a sister who had died when she was three.

While Quincy moved about to hide his deep discomfiture at this set occasion, and to submerge in casualness his qualms as to meeting expectations, Adelaide sat calmly in an armless chair and waited for her brother to subside. She ventured no word. She did not appear to dislike this silence which was so patently wracking him. The truth was that she was forcing herself to bear it. It hurt. But it was the one way, she thought, of testing Quincy’s willingness to be a friend and to be loved. That she might hazard a first step toward a desired consequence with equal right, simply did not occur to Adelaide. She was the sort of girl to whom social initiative was as repugnant as nakedness—and for the self-same reason. The obscure channelings of sex in girls spread it at times so widely from its normal moorings that the remotest mental regions become colored, with the result that some amenities of social life are as impossible for them as a crude, physical aggression. Most girls of this girl’s age and background would have been just so silent and so passive before a man from whom they awaited a proposal. Adelaide hoped for a mere sisterly relation—the privilege of friendship with a brother. Yet, with this seemingly humble dream, her way was that of a girl aroused and wooed. And the reason, although she might never know it, was that within, her condition also was the same.

Of course, Quincy did not understand. He saw merely that Adelaide was at her ancient trick of silence and of resenting his—as if the right of silence lay all with her, the need of speaking entirely with him. This, with the set formality of their retiring to her room, and the portrait of Sylvia and an indescribable something that was Adelaide herself, conjoined to complete his mood. It was a mood pathetically different from what Adelaide had hoped for. And this also dawned on Quincy:—that it would have been easier for him had she succeeded.

In this mood, silence grew too oppressive and he began to speak. Wonder was small that the girl’s first confession at his words was pain. But from the discord of these two unrhythmed ones—a discord ashamed of itself—came a great pity; and from this at length, a sort of rhythm between them. So talk grew possible, and there was born, slow and unheeded, the boy’s intuition:—that Adelaide was in the ruck and base of life, and that, with her at life’s pinnacle, there had been room there, too, for him.

She showed her wish to know about his friends. Quincy spoke of Garsted.

“Next time you come to town, why not bring him with you?”

“If I knew—” he stopped.

“If you knew what?” she asked. She could easily have completed his remark. It had to do with his insecurity at home. He would not care to bring a friend—granted it was allowed—and have himself humiliated before a guest. Garsted had never seemed to understand his rank at home. Garsted told him, in a year college would respect him. And his family had had seventeen years.

Now, Quincy was silent. Adelaide blushed for him, in his emotion.

“I—I’ll see to it, he has a nice time. You know, we can take him to the theatres. Dad isn’t stingy about the money.”

“No, but Mama is.”

“We’ll get the money from Dad.”

Quincy had found a stiff position in a chair—across the room from Adelaide. Now he arose.

“Adelaide! That isn’t everything,” he rebuked her.

At least, Adelaide felt rebuked;—as if she had not known! as if it had not been delicacy that made her also waive the issue!

“Quincy—don’t get angry with me.”

“I’m not!”

Once more, he picked up a book from the table near which, as if unconsciously for help, he had found his seat. It was a folio volume with colored pictures. They really interested him. So he turned them over, one by one.

“If you’re not going to talk with me, Quincy—”

He placed away the book at once. And they began afresh.

Another remark opened the problem of the track-team. By now, something was tiring deep down in them. Each of these failures in rapport made the new effort wearier. But on they struggled, with a heroism that was the more poignant for its hopeless inarticulation.

Quincy’s attempt to explain about the track-team suffered from an earlier behavior of the others. This subject had come up, the first evening at dinner. Suddenly, he had seen the expression about the soft mouth of Jonas that had been there in the old days when his one-time idol placed a captured fly in a spider-web. And Jonas had said, knowing already:

“You did not make a fraternity, did you?”

The expression had stung. “I would have, if I’d wanted to stay on the track-team.”

This was beyond Jonas’ comprehension. “If you’d wanted to?” he sneered. And the conversation changed before a saving word from Adelaide. For Adelaide had noticed. And now, in Quincy’s rigid manner, she knew that she was suffering for Jonas. Adelaide knew much. But her mind lacked a motor. And so hampered, it could not reach those increments which are the flower of knowledge.

Quincy recalled her saving him. He deemed her act the result of mercy, of pity—as if she shared Jonas’ incredulity but lacked his wish to make him suffer.

“I just didn’t wish to bind myself. Lots of men in college thought I was right. That’s how I got to know Garsted.” He began gropingly and ended in a hurry.

“Don’t you think, perhaps, it was wrong to antagonize your class?”

“I do not. Damn the class.”

“Well, then you were right, if you think that way about it. But then—but then, you can scarcely blame the fraternities.”

“And who blamed ’em?” cried Quincy.

Of course, it was Adelaide who blamed them. She was about to say so. But evidently, from his outburst, her next step must be to concur in his refusal to.

“Of course,” she smiled, “I don’t blame them. Who cares?”

There was a pause. Adelaide got up, came to his side:

“Well, I love you, Quincy dear.”

Audiences laugh when clumsy acrobats fall over tables. So it is fair to assume that the gods laughed at Adelaide.

The conversation died once more. And when it was renewed with a last painful effort, it was far less personal. At once, now, Quincy threw himself in it. He careered freely, happily. And in this abandon, his remarks seemed brutal to his sister. It was her turn to be hurt in this pitiful ricochet.

Garsted had told him he had a mistress. Quincy gloried in this. He knew all of Garsted’s arguments against Puritan morality. Here was another case of sex gratified in purely psychic channels. The boy launched upon a eulogy of his friend’s free life.

“Isn’t he going to marry her?” asked Adelaide. She was gripping herself. She did not mind this open talk with Quincy. Her bringing-up forbade it. And the discrepancy between the tingling pleasure that she felt and the horror that she should have felt, made her insecure. So she gripped herself and gave Quincy rein. Adelaide rode horseback—now that they were rich. A vision flashed across her of her latest mount, galloping in Central Park. She had always felt a similar strange discord between the prim Park and her joy in galloping. But the vision went, without a challenge.

“Oh,” her brother was saying, “when he has money enough, if he still loves her, I guess he’ll marry her.”

“But suppose, Quincy, suppose he stops loving her!”

“Well?”

“Don’t you see, how terrible it would be? What could the poor girl do?”

The boy looked at his sister. She seemed actually suffering. But the wealth of feeling that flowered in her pain had, as usual, gone wrong. He did not care to have his friend’s course criticized. So he attacked his sister, by extolling his friend’s mistress.

“She’s the sort of girl, I suppose,” he answered sharply, “who has other qualifications to recommend her, besides virginity.”

Tears came to Adelaide’s eyes. Quincy was contrite. He jumped up and kissed her. But her tears had made her ugly. Her tender little lids were red. Her hair seemed a trifle colorless. She was three years older than he. Why should he be able to make her weep? He despised her for it. This rôle, he disliked more heartily than being bullied. Could he not find a balance somewhere? or a pleasurable subjection? He thought of Rhoda and of Mrs. Deering. And the tenderness of Adelaide seemed cloying....

Soon, Rhoda came in for tea. And there was Adelaide—perversely at the bottom.

“Well, have you had a nice long chat?” were her first words.

Quincy could not help thinking of her as Mrs. Theodore Cram. Her husband was so important a man. Quincy disliked him so much. And he was so serenely above any feeling, even of dislike, for Quincy. All this hurt. Rhoda was fresh and cool and full as compared to Adelaide, who now looked moist and warm and straggly.

The sisters embraced heartily. Quincy got Rhoda’s hand.

“You’re getting too old to kiss,” she smiled at him. Previously, perhaps, he had not been old enough?

“I am not,” cried Quincy. It was one of those quick flashes of effrontery that mark the strain of deprivation in timid boys.