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.

He came forward and held Rhoda’s head, vise-like in his hands. Quincy was of full height. His tall, nervous figure bent over the voluptuous lined woman in striking contrast. While she was everywhere firmly composed, his form was uncertain and angular and loose.

“Behave yourself, Quincy!” Rhoda struggled.

The boy laughed feverishly. His hands held her head. But her body was writhing away. He meant to kiss her cheek. But Rhoda flashed back her head and his mouth skimmed her lips. His heart melted with the flame of that instant. And then, she broke away altogether. Quincy stood where the event had happened, arms still out, hands still before him, feeling the floor gratefully beneath his feet.

“Why, you impudent boy!” Rhoda sneered at him; “how dared you?”

“You talk as if a brother hasn’t a right to kiss his sister,” said Adelaide.

Rhoda turned upon her in a white fury: “You--shut up!”

And Quincy felt Adelaide melt into a corner. He was still looking at Rhoda.

“I am sorry if I hurt you,” he said.

“You did hurt me, you little fool,” the woman’s instinct for giving pain was unerring; “why else do you think I’m angry? You hurt me--here.” She placed a hand above her waist. “If that’s the sort of nonsense you learn at college, my dear Quincy--”

Then she had not even been angry at the kiss? This submerged the boy’s spirits altogether.

And now, with a quick change of mood and a sweet word, she drew Adelaide out of her repentant corner. The two sisters seated themselves for a quiet chat. The servant brought tea on a mahogany platter, based with glass. With a few healing smiles, there was Adelaide, once more glad to bask in Rhoda’s sunshine. Quincy drew up a chair in order to have a place in the sun. But he fared ill. Rhoda’s resentment took the direction of ignoring him. And Adelaide was feeble at bringing him within the conversation. Rhoda feinted her attempts with phrases that recalled the hand-twist of a clever fencer. The boy was being ruthlessly punished. He had had hopes of Rhoda, now he was a college man. And here he was in disgrace with her! What a clumsy, inopportune brute he had been!

Soon, he gave up his desperate attempts--they made him bleed, although she ignored them--to play an integral rôle, at least for the moment, in her consciousness. He retired spiritually. He would have gone away altogether, but he was afraid that his going would not be noticed; this would hurt too much. So he sat there, gloomily, brooding. And again, without restraint or question, his mind fell upon that unknown quality in his experience, Julia Deering. Were all women like either Adelaide or Rhoda? He feared, then, Mrs. Deering must be like the latter. She was splendid, also. And splendid women despised men. How came it, they ever married? What curious streak of humility and mercy made them do this? He knew women were incomprehensible by general consent. This must be the crux of their enigma: that, despite their splendor, suddenly they gave themselves to man! And then, some of them grew to be like his own mother. He was sure she had been like Rhoda, also. Adelaide resembled Jonas and his father. Marsden and Rhoda and he had the grey colorings of his mother.

Yet, where spiritually did he fit in? He was alone. He used to think he was only an adopted child, in the early days of familial agony. Then, he had allowed of his mother, excluding still his father. For some secret reason, it was decided that his father call Quincy “son.” But he knew his lack of authorship. That was why he despised Quincy. Also, he was jealous. For Quincy’s real father had not been so fat, so gruff, so stupid, with breath so foul smelling and hands crusted with little stains. But now, he failed to feel the link even with his mother. For if there was a link with her, surely it must extend to Marsden and to Rhoda. And this was palpably untrue. Oh! it was all a grim play of nature. Doubtless, this fat, crushing, vulgar man was really the only father he had ever had; doubtless this woman with a submerged soul like violets under stagnant waters--was it not patent in her eyes?--had justice in calling him her son. Doubtless, the young woman who had wounded him and the girl who spoke an irritating language he could not respond to, were really sisters. It was a grim jest of nature. He might as well crunch cookies that were good and look forward to the less sneering world of which college was the gate. And yet, at college also--

The door opened and his mother was there.

“Quincy, don’t spoil your appetite for dinner.”

She had first busily kissed Rhoda, maternally kissed Adelaide, and inquiringly kissed him. He had held a half-eaten cookie during all this cycle.

It was now night. The snow had subsided. Most of it had melted as it fell. An odor of moist discomfort came from the streets with Sarah--the odor of the city shopping for Christmas gifts. It was warm and cozy in Adelaide’s room. But as Quincy stood against the window and looked out, this petty ease lay in the back of his brain like a sucking plaster. The street was grey and brown. The lamp-light stumbled through the mists and vapors. A motor car went swaying, snorting; its reeking tires seemed to cut swaths in the thick gutter, like hot irons.

His mother was reciting her adventures in half-a-dozen stores. Also, she was repeating for Rhoda a series of petty household troubles which already he and Adelaide had heard four times. But Adelaide never seemed to grow impatient. And the majestic Rhoda was at attention. Quincy found in this no virtue.

Little huddled figures were sprayed through the street. They moved slowly, but laboriously. They were wet and irritated by the weather. Soon they would enter homes, like his, and recite to those they found there, eager to listen, the same round of petty trouble and smug adventure and fallacious sentiment. Would they find one among their various audiences who, like himself, objected? like himself was there through a grim jest of Nature? like himself, longed to be elsewhere? And if so, why could not he, Quincy, discover him? Why could not they be given one to another? A delivery wagon came splashing to their house and stopped. The horse shook his drenched hide. A boy leaped out, laden with packages. He saw the quick crunch of his feet, the stamp of the horse’s hoofs. And then, the bell rang loud and long. Everything outside, this sound reminded him, was muffled. It and he were inexorably separate. Yet, the house and the interminably repeated talk in the back of his brain--was it a solace for this isolation? The wagon churned its way from sight. Vaguely, he heard the rattle of the wheels. After it was gone, an elevated train mounted uptown with a slow rhythm. A car’s clear clang came to him, draped in fog. Two men trudged on the farther sidewalk. One of them laughed and slapped his comrade’s shoulder. The other pulled his hat low and turned up the collar of his coat. They disappeared--for ever. The lamps glared in the darkness that kept away from them. And his mother’s voice crushed on the melody of all these vagrant notes, bathed in the minor harmony of the night.

“Quincy--father’s just come. Suppose you go down and greet him and tell him we’re all up here.”

* * * * *

Then, there was the day--a Sunday--when his mother was ill and Quincy stayed with her, in her bedroom.

Adelaide had gone on an excursion. Jonas and Marsden never bothered. In the afternoon, for a while, his father came as if to perform a duty. On the mandate of his mother that he needed air, Quincy strolled out alone. This too, fell into the Pattern, as he traced back for it.

After the departure of the others, Quincy’s visit had begun with the reading aloud of two columns in the paper and of five pages in a magazine. This effort tired the good Sarah who, in the Harriet days, with an equal illness would not have deemed it worthy of mention to her husband. When Sarah was tired, she grew nervous. And like so many nervous women, she balanced herself with talk. The effect that women force by dint of words is a stimulant for them as insidious as liquor. The volume of words is a mere subsidiary, like the number of glasses. The effect, in either instance, is the heart of the habit. In the drinker the effect is immediate; in the talker, it rebounds from the attention of the victims talked to. In this way, it will be seen that of the two vices, talking is the worse. Drinking may confine its ravages to the drinker. At most, it will aggrieve only his close relations. The talker, however, is a curse-carrier with no conscience and no limit. Unfortunately, Quincy’s mother had lapsed into this weakness. She had been repressed, silent, really noble for so long a term! She had the right to wreak vengeance on society. Moreover, she loved her son. This called for an intense reparation.

She lectured him, that morning. For three hours, she trod on his soul, harassed his spirit and crucified his secret self for being secret--here lay the real reason of her irritation. And then, she said:

“Dearie, would you like to have your dinner brought up, so you can eat with your mother and keep her company?”

Of course, Quincy was delighted. So Quincy’s food was brought to him on the same mahogany platter with glass base. And meanwhile, the maternal service flowed. The misunderstanding boy writhed in the quandary of two necessities--loving this woman and being hurt by her. The hand of the gay God was still too strong on him; he did not know that these two elements--love and pain--must be rejoicingly accepted. Often, his mother spoke of how her children had made her suffer.

“You can never know, my boy, what a mother goes through, for a child.”

Such remarks also, were designed to instil love and veneration. But again, the gay God intervened. The idea of pain still horrified the boy. Its perversion into a boast still filled him with disgust. He would fain have had it that motherhood be joyous; that the best things be the happy things of life. His mother’s lugubrity in speaking of her works of love struck him as sacrilege. And to a gay God, it was.

Quincy was simply not grown-up. But it seemed to Sarah that in matters of sympathy and feeling, he was strangely backward.

“I should like to be able to talk to you like a man, my dear. You are no longer a child.”

And through divers thrusts, Quincy learned what she meant by this. To be like a man was to be moved by ugly things--like business and money and machinery. To be like a man was to be edified by things not only ugly but wrong,--like pain, and that murder of self called sacrifice. To be like a man was to agree, in everything, with a battered, complaining woman whose drowned violet eyes had always been a mother’s. He looked at her. He tried to understand and to consent. But it was revolting work.

“Think of the privilege your father has given you,” she said, “in letting you grow up in New York.”

“Mama--New York is ugly!”

“It is the center of the greatest country of the world,” Sarah replied. “Isn’t that of importance?”

Quincy was moved by her eloquence. Perhaps, that was of importance. Yet something in him mutely stirred negation. He was impressed. But he could not agree. And this conflict fevered him.

“An ugly metropolis is less important than a wild-flower!” he cried, stung to inspiration by his failure to express himself calmly.

Sarah smiled. She had lived among wild-flowers; she knew. She had drudged among them; sweated among them; wanted among them. She was angered by such dangerous illusions in a son of hers.

“My dear--you are talking nonsense. You’d do far better to grasp your opportunities, than to go wool-gathering--like a poet.”

“I am not a poet,” Quincy defended himself.

“That’s precisely it, my dear.” Sarah rose on her pillows and leaned toward him, taking his hand. Her skin was very grey and rough beside the whiteness of her night-gown and the smoothness of her bed-clothes. Brown streaks robbed the grey in her hair of dignity. It was drawn close over her scalp and a single, poorly braid was caught up and fastened at the back. Her arms were bone and her throat was a rugose mass of folds that lacked even the pomp of fat. Sarah was an old wreck for her fifty years. And Quincy looked at her. He was no physiognomist. But it pierced him that his mother was an ill argument for her own ways of living.

“That’s just it, my dear,” Sarah repeated. “You’re not a poet. You’re an ordinary person like the rest of us. We’ve got to get our beauty--not in wild flowers, but in all this--” she waved her tortured hand about the room and let it fall on the rich linen.

“If your skin were more white and smooth, little mother,” Quincy thought silently, “I wouldn’t care if the bed-clothes were of coarse cotton.”

His mother was still speaking. “You must work hard, dear. You must prepare yourself to get along in the world. You know--you mustn’t expect too much from your father. He will give you an education. But remember, there are five of you. And, of course, Marsden and the girls will deserve most of what little there is. Only by working now, my dear, can you earn the comfort and time to do your day dreaming later.”

“And when my skin is yellow, I also will have white linen,” the boy thought to himself.

Oh! he demanded so little. And all the plenty that was forced on him contained not that little. Everywhere, about him, above him, that little was. Yet, he could not reach it. He did not know how; he did not dare, even if he had known! For it seemed to him that all the world of men was a conspiracy against his having this mite he needed, this mite that had once been strewn through all the world and that now, only the despised were left to revel in. And he did not dare. For, vague as his knowledge was, he saw that the arch-conspirators against his having it were those he loved. To gain his little would be to wound these loved ones. With the thought, his heart broke in two.

So Quincy merely sat there. And finally, he allowed his mussed head with its flood of delicate black hair to fall on his mother’s faultless linen, where her old hand could stroke it. And in this posture of strain and of devotion, the woman that gripped his soul as once her womb had gripped his body, gave forth the poison-nourishment that he drank in. When was he to be born of her, again?

“Quincy, my boy,” she said, “there are so many ways for you to change, that it gives your mother a big pain to think of them. You must be thankful for these pains, my dear. A mother’s suffering should be a treasure and a reminder of duty, that you should never forget.”

And the old, weary canons of a herd-race, hedging in its deformities and greed against the flaming grandeur of a nature it has denied, were vented to make this child conform, in whom a tinge of the old gaieties and loves still dared to linger. A mother’s advice! How stubborn is the strength of man, that through these generations man’s tender sprouts should have outlived a mother’s advice! By the old laws, she bears her child--the old laws of nature and of joy, of fertility and courage and abandon. And by the new laws, she rears him--the laws of compromise and pain, of soul-oppression and cowardice and cover. And by the fair love of the first law, she presses her advantage for the law of the herd that claims her creature as a slave. A queen, conceiving in her regal bed, enslaved and giving birth to a slave-child. Here is the cycle of most women.

Quincy held his head low as his mother admonished and advised him. It was all still dim and uncertain in his mind, why these things seemed wrong to him; why they revolted him; why the common wisdom and love of his mother should be despised. Quincy did not understand, as she went on, how apt it was that his head should be held low.

A glimmer there was, in the Pattern--he saw that, later--of the truth: that he had been so moved that day, only because the woman who spoke was his mother. Quincy knew that she was stupid; that she parroted her moralities and arguments; that mentally, she was a slave of the herd-leaders who cared no whit for either of them. He saw, then, the fallacy in this: that by reason of a mother’s love, he should have hearkened to a plea voiced for a vast, impersonal machine to which he mattered nothing save as a conforming cog. Of course, that part of his mother was also such a cog. It had no right to exploit the bonds of the real mother who knew and cared for no machine.

All this bred resentment. And there began for Quincy the period in which he despised his mother, judged her ruthlessly and had little thought for her when she was not about.

* * * * *

His father came in at four. So Quincy left for a walk.

That walk was in the Pattern. But when he traced back his feelings for his father, he could not fix, as in the other cases, upon some event of this fortnight that lodged within him as a form. Thought and emotion about his father rushed back with an indefeasible momentum to the days of Harriet, to his running away or to the nights when he was sent up, a-tremble, through the hollow house, to bed or on an errand. As he traced back, now, for signs of his father that were alive, all he caught up was that his entering on that afternoon had spread a surface of great toleration upon his mother’s words. He had gone forth in peace with her. Perhaps, he recalled enough of the old days to feel that she might need his sympathy, being alone with her husband. There had been such times.

Quincy had cold crisp hours for his walk. He went northward in the Park. At first he had had a qualm. He had told his mother New York was ugly. He had escaped to sophistry and metaphysics in order to prove with Garsted that it was beautiful. It did not occur to the boy that since in both cases he had been sincere, he had no cause for worry. He racked his brain in order to find out in which instance he had said the truth. And to his mother, he felt the debt of an apology. But it occurred to him how ludicrous it would be to beg his mother’s pardon on such a subject. She would think him wilder and more scatter-brained than ever. Doubtless, she had long since forgotten his remark. At least, she attached no importance to it. This aggrieved Quincy. And in his new-born resentment, he forgot about inconsistencies and pardons. Soon, he was engrossed in the City.

This was at the point where the Park ends and Eighth Avenue begins afresh, with a new acquisition in the clatter and grime and darkness of the elevated structure. During his swift walk in the Park, it had been simple to cogitate upon himself. The Park did not hold Quincy. It was a rough, varied and knotted expanse of dirty snow and gaunt, dwarfed trees. It had none of the mystery, none of the tonic, of a winter woodland. It was a large back-yard of the City. Through it, cut wide, cleared swathes for City vehicles and narrow ones, less cleared, more tortuous, for those inhabitants that went on foot. There were few people, though the day had been bright. It was too cold. New Yorkers suffer such inclemency of life that the least inclemency of weather rids them of spirit. So Quincy had advanced through the Park without a thrill of nature. Though he was a messenger of her spirit--he who ran bare-headed through the woods--this cut-in mass of rocks and trees had no voice for him. The girders of steel and stone that on all sides bound the Park have smothered the soul which that fragment of forest must once have had. Central Park is a half-dead thing, at best. Its winter snows are grey; its summer trees are grey; its autumn fever is a wasting chill without the flame. Some day, inevitably, this must be true also of the great Park in the Bronx.

But now, on the noisy Avenue, matters were different.

Quincy recalled his feeling that the City’s life spoke to him. Night was there. Most of the shops were closed. But beneath the blinds of the saloons, lights shone and a welcome winked. In the tall dun buildings, all enterprise seemed choked like the space, into a rigid ever-recurrent form. The movement on the Avenue was dogged, outcast, heavy. But its dullness did not penetrate behind the brick and plaster. The trains crashed past angrily as if they had preferred to linger, and also watch. Beneath the structure, the lights seemed badly nourished. Those in the houses were of a yellow that suggested malady and poison. It was the life throbbing in these that spoke to Quincy. What did it say?

Something he had heard before: something he had already suffered. Again, there was the strident tongue of metal and the lips that bled. Again, the lips lay quiveringly forward, piteous and eloquent, while the tongue lurked back and darted forth in the swings of pain. And behind the mouth were words; below the rhythm was a music, as fire is beneath the smoke.

It was his own experience; it was his family; it was his life. All of the City spoke it--sang it--the obscure, muffled rooms, and the frangent traffic; the glimmer of breath in the dark hallways and the flash of commerce on the elevated structure, as a train met ice with its current. The entire symphony of twisted, agonizing life, bent upon false errands, hungering with false lusts, deforming the red heart of nature, spoke out to Quincy. And that which he heard was that which he already knew, that whence he had come bleeding and whither he must return to bleed some more.

And so, with subtle intertwinings, this vast impersonal life and his own narrow living became one, as the Pattern whirled.

There were many other salient parts of it; many other clarified events, as he traced back. And the veins and curvings were to dispart and spread and multiply. But even the tight seed was a weighty form, lodged in his mind....

* * * * *

Greatly increased with the new year, Quincy had returned to college.

VIII

At this point, Fortune resumed a hand. She had been singularly absent in Quincy’s life since her intrusive visit of his first two years when the fate of the two eldest children, the accident to Marsden and the Burt finances had so obliquely glanced against his own. From then, his life had been pure enough of hazard to be in that regard exceptional. For hazard is the term we apply to striking moments; and each life by its own testimony, is replete with such. But now, upon his return to college, after that purging and clarifying fortnight, an apt facilitation came to his affairs. The Deerings gave a party. There were about a score of guests. And Quincy was among them.

He was the one member of his class to be invited. Garsted was his sole haven from the social waves. And Garsted, having other friendships there, had other responsibilities. In consequence, the boy was somewhat lost. The gathering had the proclivity of breaking up into small groups, discussing in hushed and exclusive tones. Over these fragmentary units, the clear loud laughter of Professor Deering rolled at times, himself the heart of the largest fragment. Quincy was afraid to make himself one of this, since his relation with Professor Deering might be so easily abused. He did not know how to join with any of the others. So not long after the onset of the evening, there he was dangling, miserable at first, then conscious of his misery and at length fearful lest this consciousness in him project to those about him and so crystallize his discord with them. In this state his hostess rescued him.

He had scarce noticed her before. She was a much used pigment in the bright picture’s pallet. But she had scarcely been a figure. Her general affability with her reserve kept her from distinctness. But now he saw her coming, directly toward him. Her air was not that of a rescuer. She seemed to be saying: “I know you are having a splendid time without me. But I’m greedy. I’m not having a splendid time without you.” This was half the battle. She began casually and soon they were seated together. Fitfully, others joined her. But he alone remained. She left him to persuade an eminent pianist to perform. But she returned to listen to the music. The artist played several complex pieces--modern--that stirred Quincy potently.

“I can’t understand that music,” said Mrs. Deering.

“I’m not trying to,” he said, “I get all relaxed and then it comes in and--understands me.”

This answer seemed to impress her hugely.

“That was an infinite answer, Mr. Burt,” she said. And, then, the pianist joined them. He was introduced to Mr. Carvalho. And his remark about the music was repeated, as a gem, word for word. In her mouth, it rang profound. Mr. Carvalho, also, was impressed.

“Probably, you compose?” he asked.

The bringing in of the pianist meant the loss of Mrs. Deering, who left now, and did not return. There had been fully half-an-hour of her company. And the energy which she had aroused propelled him happily through the remainder of the evening. As soon as he was free of Mr. Carvalho, to whom he had absolutely naught to say, and who forsook him as soon as he politely could in order to trail after Mrs. Deering, Quincy crossed into the study where the Professor held an intent group.

At the rear of his room which Quincy, of course, knew, the door had been thrown open into a smaller chamber in which stood the piano. This was Mrs. Deering’s. It was rather closely furnished and fully ornamented. It contrasted strikingly with the naked, larger room. Here they had sat--close to the music. Quincy did not catch many details on this occasion. He recalled a languid couch, littered with barbaric cushions--the modern German school--and bowered by a canopy of orange silk that turned the blue base below it into a liquid marine color. He recalled several cozy arm-chairs wherein guests were ensconced deeply, a tea-table of Japanese wood upon which was a case of _cloisonné_. Out of it, the guests took cigarettes. This was essentially a setting for the hostess. Her figure, thin and tense and simply draped in a dull violet dress, stood out nobly in this rather lavish mass. Even so, the generous and ample form of the Professor was well marked against the scant rigor of his study.

Quincy found him sprawling in a Windsor fan-backed chair--an old spindle of oak. One heavy leg was thrown over the side, the other curled up on the seat. His evening clothes, which were a bit too tight, had the semblance of broadcloth in the soft haze of the candles. The Professor puffed on a rich, red briar pipe.

“Bring a chair up--right here. There’s room,” he hailed him from a distance.

As he came, Quincy felt a strained pressure about him. These half-dozen men had banded themselves into a unit, designed for the momentary purpose of enjoying the big man that sat among them. Tacitly, unconsciously they had grown together; they felt together; they gave out a voice together. Their vibrance murmured adversely at this intrusion. They were a crowd, conservative, greedy like all crowds. A primitive mist came from them. Behind, in the other room, such groups were also--fashioned for their own delectation, to enjoy their hostess or some other person who had something to give out. Everywhere, Quincy felt these subtle bands, these correlated breathings, these intense concentrations of many energies upon some little temporary point. He was unused to gatherings. He could still understand them. But he could not understand himself. There was no hint in him of why, alone after his half hour with the Professor’s wife, he had gone straight toward the Professor.

In Quincy’s mind remained the print of these two rooms, undulant in their candle-glow, where many persons sat, restrained, vital, softened only by the tremor of the lights, subdued by skin-deep custom; yet eager, all, for acquisition and enjoyment to a degree that rubbed menacingly close to the frailties that hemmed them in. In his mind was the great, sanguine figure of the Professor, dominating, laughing at this little crowded drama; was the sharp, nervous body of Julia Deering, a-field in it, like some splendid animal that furrows. That was all.

But Garsted told him that he had acquitted himself with honor. And that Fairfax and Littleton had asked about him....

During the rest of freshman year, the boy was at the Deering home perhaps six times. Outside, he saw the Professor seldom. But no more was needed to establish him as idol in that youthful sanctuary. Garsted, of course, was the high priest. And though the ultimate presence was but briefly, and then scantily, approached, Garsted was always there. The junior had constant recourse to Mr. Deering in his work. Also, he was a friend of Julia Deering. This was an added bond for Quincy.

“I knew her when she was Julia Cairn,” he told him. “She is of old New England stock, but her parents had so little sense of fitness as to permit her to be born in Omaha, where they had settled. She’s been married only three years, you know. From private school in New York, she went to Paris. No--she did not study there. She has never studied, that I know of. After Paris, she returned to Omaha! Actually! And stood it two years. By then, she had been made president of so many women’s clubs and circles, forcibly--you know her opinion of such truck--that she escaped to an aunt in Bangor, Maine. From cellar to refrigerator. Next, she came to New York and began to work.”

“I thought you said she had never studied.”

“She never did. But she worked. She got a job as teacher of English in the private school which she had graduated from, five years before. Without a degree, without anything very much, except her power to get anything she desires. Her knowledge in English literature is rather rudimentary. But she had read tremendously in French and Spanish and Italian.”

“Why, then, didn’t she get a job in one of these languages?” asked Quincy.

“I don’t know. Except that Julia Cairn never did what was expected, any more than does Julia Deering now. It was down there I heard of her and met her--at a silly tea, which she veined with gold. A friend of mine, Betty Robinson, used to tell me about their amazing lectures in English literature, delivered by a Miss Cairn. It seems her course was devoted to a systematic proof of the inferiority of English letters to the French. Think of it! In a respectable private school. And her adoring principal never minded. While the girls in their French course were reading Erckmann-Chatrian, Halèvy, Ohnet and other fourth-rate writers, she, in the English department, made them acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, Zola and Stendhal, so that they might see for themselves how unutterably second-rate were Eliot and Thackeray. She made them read the Englishmen. But she made them love the real European literatures. In that way, she justified teaching what she had often told me she deemed a language that has been ‘decadent since the time of Swift.’ Lead up to these things, yourself. She’ll tell you.”

“And what happened then?” Quincy was not interested in a decadent literature.

“She taught in that one school until the principal, Doctor Tomley, went and died. She was twenty-six, then, at least. Although I’m not sure of her age.”

“Did she lose her job or leave it?”

“She says she was told to go, by the new man who had been assistant master and who probably, in that menial position, had learned to hate her. I am convinced she could never have found another school to tolerate her original ideas of the duties of an English teacher. But she did not try. She insists she could have won over another principal, had she been forced to. It is highly probable. Certainly, Dr. Tomley had agreed with none of her views. And yet, he kept her there. At all events, the boast never went to the proof.”

“Well?” Quincy was impatient.

“Well, one fine day, she married Deering--bless his great soul. That’s all. And came up here.”

Here, somehow, with the entrance of the Professor upon the scene, Quincy’s real interest began. But his friend’s news ended.

“I know nothing about that, Quint,” he smiled. “One never really asks Julia Deering anything. One inclines toward a subject. And if she inclines back, one gets something. On the subject of her personal life, she has always _declined_, with a firm sweetness. I have no idea, even of where they met or how. No one else has, either. I suppose,” the upperclassman threw a cigarette out of the window and reached for a pipe, “I suppose they were married and will live happily ever after. Julia Deering is so damned exceptional that it will be just like her to do that most commonplace of things.”

“Is living happily ever after really commonplace?”

“Well,” Garsted laughed, “if it is rare, she is all the more sure to do it. So I’ve got you, either way.”

On the campus, however, there was a legend about this pair. College men have myths for their distinguished teachers. But like all myths, this one expressed exclusively the myth-makers; and it was Garsted’s conviction that there was no truth in it save as a commentary on the undergraduate state of mind.

It was this: that the big, gentle man who was over forty when the marriage happened, had been proposed to by correspondence. The letter was so brilliantly couched, its choice of phrases was so concise, so just, so Greek, that the scholar wired to the writer to appear at once. Julia Cairn came on the following train and they were married that afternoon by the college president, who was a minister of the gospel. The legend went on to relate that the writer of the happy letter was not Mrs. Deering at all, but one of her girl pupils. This beautiful but anonymous victim had been caught by her teacher writing in class. Her letter was detected and confiscated; later on employed with slight corrections, to fit the purpose of Miss Cairn. Since the Professor’s discovery of his wife’s plagiarism, the myth concluded, the pair’s lot had been a miserable one. But Mrs. Deering was too dominant to be got rid of.

Of course, Quincy laughed at this legend. But its conclusion--that the marriage was unhappy, that the great man had been betrayed, that he needed sympathy and rescue--stuck attractively in his mind. For this very reason, perhaps, he failed to see how the myth reflected the student body’s general emotional condition. As Garsted told him, since his state also was reflected by the myth, there was no mystery in his failure to psychologize it.

It was plain, all of that freshman year, however, that strange conflicts raged in the boy about the Deering household.

“She always comes in and bothers him,” he remarked. “And the minute she comes in, he tells her just what we’ve been talking about.”

“He knows you don’t mind,” said Garsted.

“But I do!”

“Will you stop confiding in him? Doesn’t that prove you don’t object?”

At length came an hour alone with her.

“Come in to see _me_, some afternoon,” she called to him from the stairs, as the Professor and he sat in the study. Later, as he was leaving, he found her watering the flowers. She was dressed in a frock of faint rose. A bonnet hid all of her black hair. Her hands were covered with sod.

“Come next Monday, Mr. Burt,” she said, scarce looking up from her work, and not in the least anxious as to an answer. Quincy found it awkward to accept to the back of her head. So he went on, without a word, perfectly aware that he would be expected.

His anticipation of the visit was perturbed. He was fearful of what it would entail. He was unwilling to leave it to hazard. He improvised their dialogue; he edited his inventions and kept constantly transforming them. All of his fancies were delightful. In them, he impressed Mrs. Deering greatly. And in the later ones, when he gained courage, she told him that she liked him more than any other of the students. She confided in him what she had kept hidden from Garsted--the secrets of her life. Quincy did not go into details with this. He thought he might best leave that to her. But at the end, he went completely disgusted with himself. He knew that the reality and his imaginings would not agree. In his own fancies, he had exhausted the pleasant possibilities. Infallibly, therefore, that which was going to take place could not be pleasant. As he rang the bell, he felt that he had injured the prospect of a happy time by imagining that happy time. And then, as she opened the door for him, he forgot his speculations. He began living in the present.

Before the summer, there were two more tea hours with her. Each of them stood alone. No word uttered at one could ever have been confused with any word uttered at the others. Yet, despite their clearness, they were indissoluble. They lay together in Quincy’s mind as the boundary to a great and vague impression. The vague impression was first; behind, remoter, were these clear visits. As the boy envisaged them, it was as if, before them, Julia Deering had not existed. Instinctively, he accepted this: that before them, she had not existed, although his reason told him otherwise. And of course, his reason did not count. In like fashion, does a primitive people accept a day and an event when the world began. Its reason also, had it been consulted, would have judged otherwise.

* * * * *

“Why am I interested in the household life of a philosopher? Why do I resent his wife yet dream of her? Why, when I dwell on his perfections, does she seem to mar them? Why, when I let her vision come does his seem to dim? What business are all these things to me? I am a protégé of Professor Deering. Each year, out of the incoming mass, he selects a few like me. I have interested a woman happening to be his wife, who, being an interesting woman, is naturally capable of interest in another. There is nothing more. Yet my mind goes--like fingers picking rags--hoping for a fabulous jewel; tremulously. What is wrong with me?”

These questions Quincy put to himself, as the sun mellowed and the spring burst forth from the brown earth and the haggard trees. Quincy took them with him on his country runs. The ground was damp with moisture. Maple buttons stood on the long twigs. And as he ran or sauntered or reclined on a dry rock, garlanded in the shoots of little elms and oaks, the question rounded like a fist, hardened and struck him silent.

All of that spring this phenomenon was repeated. There would sprawl the questions, pricking or stroking him--no more. Suddenly, a vital force would encompass, then compress them. They would become a fist and strike him. He would startle, resist, give way. And then, as suddenly, the fist would once more disintegrate. Again, there would be relaxation until the following blow. All of that spring, moreover, there was no conclusion.

Certain things were plain enough.

Professor Deering was the greatest man in the world. His friendship was priceless. But Julia Deering was the first woman in the world willing to consort with him. Was that less a treasure? And why should it be? Why did some sickly sense within him tell him of a conflict between these two possessions? He had a mind; he had a soul. Did these two possessions menace one another? Perhaps that explained the mist about the two new human elements. But with all this, the boy’s head hurt. And his mind helped him out, through some centrifugal tangent.

There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and Julia Deering. There was nothing really personal in the relation of Quincy and Lawrence Deering. The personal, in either instance, was the boy’s contribution. The man believed to have discovered in him a mind; he had not gone far enough yet with him to view this, save as a specimen, as a relief, perhaps, in his work. The woman thought to have found in him a spirit. She also had not gone far enough to adventure there, preferring to bring it up within the scope of her own play. Quincy, quite with an equal egoism, had subjected these to his own lights. But his lights were feebler than their medium. So it was he who was refracted, rather than they who were transfigured. Quincy was the suffering one; for Quincy was the changing one.

All this was a whirling in the dark for him. He understood so little. His year at college seemed so sounding a failure. What had it got him?

* * * * *

He sat on a rock, panting for breath, from his run up-hill. Columbine and azalias flourished about him. The fresh hum of insects deepened the glow of last autumn’s leaves, heightened the clear tenderness of the anemones. A great oak twisted above him on its tortuous way to the sun-flushed sky. Numerous little oak trees with fresh red leaves, most of them doomed to perish, ran riot with the other foliage in the cleft where he sat. Solomon’s seal and chestnut sprouts, liquid patches of wild violets, geranium and slender sprays of the wild grape with its leaves ruddy red and velvet green, shared his nook with him. Below swept the valley, splashed with dogwood, an infinity of greens and rose-bathed white. Through all the woodland, the wind raced daintily. A copse of aspen swayed in a complex unison, while the sun danced counterpoint on the leaves. Blossoming fragrance and a humid acrid strain of fecund life waved over him. The sky came down, its blue burning upon him. And beyond, the sun slanted westward, bursting well up in a haze that consumed its less gentle fires.

So garrisoned, Quincy met himself, and sought an accounting of his year in college. The boy frowned. And the day’s grandeur went over him like a rich garment over a soiled body. He shivered for it. He was ashamed. He understood nothing save his own impotence. He felt nothing save his suffering. He was nothing, before a universe of splendor. Family and friendship, fellowship and duty--in all relations, he seemed slipping, tottering. There was no name for what he was, since there was no name to describe anything within his life. He was unsure of qualities at home. In the house of college as in the house of Deering, he was uncertain. He was a nameless thing. And all the nameless things that touched him, for want of appellation, faded to naught or turned against him; all things save this one thing that grew greater without a title: his unhappiness.

The sun sent a spear of flame through the haze. It gleamed on his face, as he sat there, gazing with steady eyes. His eyes were in shadow. Deep purple they were, a pathetic counterpart of black. The lashes lay long about them. On his mouth were myriad little nervous frets, such as make up a pathetic counterpart of smiling. Quincy turned his eyes toward the falling sun. They glowed now, a limpid blue. And the black lashes were bronze. And the moist mouth opened and grew strong.

Meanwhile, however, the sun was falling.

IX

Quincy was not very well, that summer. He had always been hardy. His supple muscles, which he could trace ridging beneath the white skin of his arms and shoulders, had seemed a barrier to trouble, despite the delicate tension of his nerves. Even on this occasion, he was not really ill.

He had caught cold in the woods. Often, although he did not tell the doctor this, he would throw himself prone on the moist soil and fling his head into a tuft of verdure, where he could absorb the incense of new-born things. Often he would clamber on a tree--an apple tree groaning with blossoms was his predilection--and lie there, across a branch, arms balancing his weight, until his eyes grew heavy and he had to go, lest sleep tumble him down. Or--this was a new discovery of that spring--he would find a sudden cleft on a high bench above a brook, made smooth and sweet with the last season’s underbrush. Seating himself at its head, he would slide down through brambles of blackberry and over clumps of moss, arms waving, head bare. Running hatless in the rain was an ecstasy that even he was wary of. But more than once that spring, with the rain pouring, his head grew waterlogged with lessons and meditations--neither of which he seemed able to bring to a conclusion. He would throw himself from his desk, board a trolley to the outskirts of the town and trudge forth on the muddy road until there came a space where there was no one in sight. Then, off would come his hat, and like a wild thing vaguely aware of trespass, he would cut into the drenching fields, bare-headed, ardent, until his body glowed and his feet weighed like lead. Then, with his face down he would return and silently change his clothes.

But about this spirit of a faun was after all the body of a man. Congestion and inflammation fastened on Quincy. The doctor made a long face, gave him a diet and told him to stay as much as possible on the porch.

Needless to say, the Burt household moved from the sweating city every June. Summer torridity in New York is an unnatural thing. It does not come gently like the fires of France or Italy. It is as if the monstrous city had been rushing, rushing, rushing--all of the winter. At last it got overheated. That was the summer. Only a very young and healthy person can rush himself into a sweat and husband his good nature. New York’s overheatedness is angry. So those that can, leave her alone, until she is cool again and ready for another rushing.

The summer house of the Burts on this occasion was an old splendid mansion hidden in three acres of uncultivated woodland. It was but an hour from New York. From the macadam highway where the motors flashed continually by, a rustic road led past a fence and a tiny wooden bridge. The bridge was over a thread of brooklet. Thick shrubs smothered it from sight. And all of the gentle green things here were stained with dust and matted with gasoline. The road ran a hundred yards, between great oaks and willows. Here, shielded splendidly, was the house. There were great white pillars. The forward wall was brick. The porch was broad and open. And within, the high-ceilinged, ample rooms were perpetually cool. Rambler roses, petunias and canna surrounded the porch, above which on either side were frames for wistaria and grape-vines. From the porch one could hear the crash of the motors, glimpse their dust. And in the evenings, their lamps shot into view, flooded a space of foliage and then clapped away. This did not interest Quincy--although it was Marsden’s chief delight. But at the house’s rear lay a thick, brambled bit of forest--a complete miniature of nature. Within a few acres, the boy discovered rocks and hills, valleys and rivers, a settlement of birds that made symphony each night over a sunken pond where the frogs croaked, and a dingle utterly enclosed in elder-bushes where a space of grass lay sweet and gentle, in contrast to the riot of rough foliage without. Here he could steal away and be as well secluded from alien sight and sound as if home were in another State--save when the wind brought him his mother’s voice, scolding the servants in the kitchen.

“Look here, little East Wind,” he would scold in turn, “are you turned traitor, to bring me _that_?” And straightway, the wind would curl about the willow tree, and giggle a bit and stop.

He had been gazing at that tree a long time--and many times. His dingle sloped somewhat so that, for comfort, he had always to lie facing one way. That way was nearly west. And it brought the willow full into his vision. Of a sudden, this struck him as a portent.

“Oh, great willow tree,” he asked, “is it on purpose that I must always gaze on you and see the sun fall through your fingers?”

A bright red bug with purple stripes, round and fatherly, had climbed on his cuff. Presently, it jumped off in his palm. He held it up and as it trudged toward his finger tips, it too faced westward.

“Admire the sun, little bourgeois!” Quincy commanded.

Of a sudden, the bug hopped away. There had been no food on his palm, for it.

“You refuse to admire the sun?” said the boy, thoroughly serious. “Well, you’re a lucky little bourgeois not to have to.”

In ways like this, Quincy managed to forget himself. He was alert always, for a dialogue in the woods. But a few hundred yards beyond, in the old house, he was forever still and eaten-up with moods.

Despite the real simplicity of their house, the Burts liked it. Rhoda and her husband consented to spend a month there with them. Later, during her husband’s vacation, they were going to the mountains. Rhoda’s close presence that July was of import to Quincy. His family had several more acute impressions to inject in him before its full task was done. And what with his undigested year at college still upon him, and the vague threats of a second year to impose upon a first which had not yet retired into a spiritual composition, Quincy was in a sensitive state for new shocks and for new colors. His self-constituted idylls back of the house were not all of his summer. Life in the raw came to the country with him. Nor was it ashamed, it seemed, to grate and pound and give ruthless exhibitions, even if the flowers and trees and birds did sing outside the windows.

There was an excursion into new land. And of course, all of these things, new and old, while they seemed at first merely to make more mud of his problems, were really a solvent to help clear them. The new excursion came in the form of a girl--a friend of Adelaide--Clarice Lodge.

The Lodge family had a house, half a mile away, not nearly so splendid as the one which the Burts rented. But Mr. Lodge owned his house and they lived in it, all of the year. He was a lawyer, in New York--a real commuter. Adelaide had met Clarice in the city. They were not very close friends, at the summer’s outset. Nor were they any closer at the summer’s end. Adelaide, who was twenty-one, explained that she could never possibly grow intimate with a girl who was only seventeen. Withal, Clarice looked up to her and vigorously sought her out, when she learned that the Burts had leased the Frondham mansion.

That was the title of the house. It was owned by Miss Juliet Frondham, an ancient lady of an ancient stock. She was too poor to live in this mocking relic of her whilom glory. But she was too proud to sell it and too fond of it to live far away. So Miss Frondham with her maid lived in a suite of rooms in the more built-up section of the township. She kept her own house immaculate and rented it for as long periods as she could.

Two years later, this proud, poor lady--the last of her line--died, leaving a fortune of three hundred thousand dollars to her maid. Three brothers came like a storm out of Illinois. The will was contested and eventually broken. The faithful maid proved to be a villain who with fiendish cunning had turned her mistress against her entire kin. She ended in the penitentiary. And Josiah Burt bought the Frondham mansion.

* * * * *

Into the press, then, of Quincy’s summer went these three new ingredients: a feeling of Rhoda’s married life, the tide-like load upon him of all the first year’s happenings at college, and Clarice.

The awful inconsequentiality of life, the absoluteness of each moment and the doom of never-more that lurks in each moment’s easy, gliding pace, the state of death to which inexorably each new state of life is born--these are the things of which youth happily is unaware. He plunges on like a swift runner upon a path pied with sweet flowers. He does not really know that these flowers are everything and the goal, a mere place for dropping off. He says: “These flowers are as naught, to the flowers yonder.” So he suffers them to escape past him in a blurred line of recollection. Their intimate detail he sacrifices to a distant vagueness. He refrains from fingering the down on their petals, from breathing their live perfume in order to be possessed by a monster builded of his own energy. If the truth flashed his way, he would stand still and the world would stand still. He would fear to venture and to desire. Or his steps would become the groping of a blind man in a wilderness. He would make a universe out of a single flower at his foot; not make a flower at his foot out of the universe. But the greater truth is doubtless that he should not know the truth; that he should press on unheeding. For courage is an ignorant and fresh-born thing that is wiser and older than wisdom.

July was the month of Rhoda, August the month of Clarice. Julia Deering, of course, was always present. There was a strange bitterness to see the un-ideal intercourse of Rhoda and her husband. Since their marriage, Quincy had seen less of them than one does of a good acquaintance. He had not accepted Theodore Cram. But in his capacity of mate to Rhoda, he had idealized him. He did not consciously idealize his brilliant sister, but in his own quality of younger brother, he had accepted her as, of course, winningly adjusted. Now, came this sordid revelation. Rhoda and her husband could quarrel with each other, sneer at each other, remain indifferent to each other’s presence, and make a pleasure of each other’s irritations! These were all little things, of course. Sarah would smile in her rocker, folding her hands and declaring that such insignificant disagreements were inevitable. Josiah did not pay heed enough even to pass them over. To Marsden, they furnished amusement. Jonas, like his father, seemed temperamentally impervious, and Adelaide, as with most things that happened in the household, would be quickly aggrieved and as quickly her unruffled self again. To Quincy, these little quarrels--that Rhoda or Theodore were the last to take seriously or to remember--were soilings of dirt on a work of art. The analogy was perfect, since the thing soiled was indeed his handicraft. But they were more: they were a source of stirring the old waters. They led to speculations about Julia Deering and her husband; they compelled painful efforts to seek conclusions and to avoid conclusions, about the generality of men and women.

It was unbearable to think of Professor Deering as so haggled and so upset. Yet, could one have guessed from the calm brow of Theodore Cram, from the smooth bosom of his magnificent sister, that such things could be? Was all of the world a hypocrite? Could there be worms beneath the surface of his marble masterpiece, before even the soil marred it to the eyes?

It was a droll commentary upon justice that Quincy, at whom this couple snapped their fingers, should have been hurt by their delinquencies. Of course, in the old days, there had been murmurings at home about Rhoda. He recalled her as a child, screaming and scratching, carrying war upon Adelaide and Jonas. But always, it had been successful war--war with a quick and unqualified decision. Adelaide was always surrendering, Jonas was always being overwhelmed. That justified Rhoda. There had been a sweep of power in her place at home. She had dominated; she had wielded her sway. When she sneered at Adelaide or him, her sneer cut true. When she shot angry words at her mother, or Jonas, or her father, these words stood trembling, like an arrow, in the heart of the target. And with Marsden, there had been always a deference and a calm--like two great Powers at balance on a continent between their mutual dependencies.

Here, however, it was different. Theodore Cram did not bleed at her sneers, nor lie transfixed with her angry words. Theodore Cram could cut back and shoot back. And tears came more readily in Rhoda’s eyes than the flash of pain on her husband’s mouth. Rhoda had her match. And in the poise of this even combat, Quincy learned its pettiness and sordidness. From this conclusion, came the inevitable step: that her warfare of old must have been similarly petty, and that the woman who waged such, with such incessance, must be of a measure with her battles. The boy’s brain receded before it would take on this lesson. Was Rhoda narrow and petty and mean of spirit? Had her cause of battle against them all been sordid? and her victims, the result not of her own excellence but of their own mediocrity? Here were two strong and striking observations to make lie together: that in their marital irritations, Rhoda was no more generous or ideal than her hard-hearted husband--and that, in her appearance and her charm, Rhoda was as enfevering and inspiring as ever. Could these two knowledges couple and give birth to strength in Quincy? At least the struggle of conception and the ensuing labor were painful interludes. A woman, then, could be beautiful, dominant, entrancing, yet have a soul of flint? a woman could hold one, yet by qualities that one despised? a woman could forge sovereignty at home, yet abdicate to the level of those she ruled at her maturity? What was this creature, woman? And how came it that he, Quincy, full with his eighteen years, could compute and reckon his superiority all of a forenoon in the woods, yet be a mute, inglorious thing before her glance, at lunch?

In Theodore Cram there was no longer any glamor. The man was without vision or ideals or beauty. Yet Rhoda loved him! gave herself to him! And an hour after those dark mystic hours they must have spent together, she could despise him or ignore him--he could despise her or ignore her! Was there not this ugly identity between them? And then how, viewing her husband’s pettiness, could Rhoda be deemed better? How, with these things established, could she still have power and charm for Quincy? It had sufficed merely to glimpse them to cause Theodore Cram to lose his glamor. Oh! the perplexities were myriad and infinitely intertwining.

Perhaps he might have solved--or at least met them--had they led no farther than these two. But irrevocably, the perplexities flowed out to Julia Deering, to his mother, to himself. Until the whole whirled like a dizzy dream, where arms, outstretched for a firm hold, turned into gyres and spun along.

Though the act was unconscious, Quincy fixed on Clarice Lodge to solve these problems, answer these questions. She had no part in his emotions. She seemed solid and dependable to Quincy. He did not know that when she also had been drawn into the furnace of his feeling, she also would swirl with the fire and fumes. Childishly confident, he fixed on her, being unaware that at his age to attach upon another is really to absorb that other and burn that other up. Even so does flame fix on a twig. But Quincy was sure that he would learn everything from her and that his interest was scientific.

She was known as a pretty girl. And until one time when he really saw her, this had seemed the right term to Quincy. Thereafter, it appeared to him to be injustice.

It was at their house. Adelaide was below the porch, trimming the roses that had drooped too low. Clarice leaned over the porch railing. Quincy was to one side and unobserved. He had stepped out through the door. The two girls chatted brightly. Clarice led the conversation. She was coaxing her friend to admit that red was far more beautiful than blue. In a prim, white jumper, with Dutch neck, she bent her alert body downward. The pressure of the rail below her waist drew the frail cloth tight against her breasts. She was bending toward the left. When she laughed--which was half the time--a tremor went through her body as if it too were laughing. When she talked, she swayed gently, her whole form together, to and fro against the railing that first ate hard upon her and then gave her up. In this way the fluted railing spokes marked out their pattern against her body. Her right knee was forward and her right foot dangled. This gave accent to her rhythm. The discovered leg with its black silk stockings, pointed with tiny, white-canvas slippers, was straight and strong and fleshless. It cut like a tangent movement to the misty sway of her body. And here, Quincy kept his eyes enchanted. In the slow, steady rhythm of her body, to and fro against the railing, while her words sparked brightly, there seemed a faint, voluptuous deliberation. Her voice was a moist crystal. The nape of her neck was a nook with tiny and bronzed ringlets. He did not see her face. But now, in the pause, the girl’s subtle sense came into play. She felt him there; she straightened and turned toward him. And their eyes met.

Both of them felt the burn of their blushing. With a soft hand, Clarice smoothed her skirt in front from the waist down--slowly. It had been very faintly ruffled. But the fact that her consciousness was there, drove Quincy’s eyes to her face, though in his quandary they had once more fallen. He did not know how to take them entirely away.

At that moment, it came about that he discovered it unjust to call Clarice merely pretty.

With a sudden fervor, he had said to her: “Will you go walking with me, tomorrow?”

She had given one peal of laughter, grown serious and between the two states, replied: “Why--of course, I will!”

But if their walks, that summer, through the woods were so many wild-flowers, they were of the sort that onrushing youth could not stop to contemplate. Quincy deemed commendably mature the dispassionate way in which he set out to take Clarice. They were to be simply friends, and perhaps they might bring good to one another. The boy was sure that, had she known, his mother would have approved his conduct. But the doubting Sarah had no insight into his calm. Her eyes grew cloudy and troubled when his walks with Clarice became engrossingly frequent. On one occasion she said to him:

“Are there no young men about for you to play with?”

Quincy had seen the young men in the town’s post-office, and at the soda fountains. They were a typical group--shallow-eyed, and narrow-headed, with the manners of fox-terriers and the souls also--probably. They were the sort of boys who instinctively stiffened their necks when Quincy was about. There were no other boys--Clarice’s brother was fourteen. So Quincy’s mother should have been less fearful of this new friendship.

Adelaide found a way to express her view of it.

“Clarice is a child--a dear child,” she fell into repeating. She seemed to believe that childhood was a race. One who was once a child would remain one always. Never could the chance be admitted that there exist in Clarice at seventeen, things which would one day grow like Adelaide at twenty-one. Perhaps, Adelaide was right Perhaps, childhood is a generic quality. But, howsoever, from the days of Quincy’s absorption, there was a barrier between the girls.

Clarice felt this. And being with Quincy was a way of resenting it. She was a fresh, unspoiled sprout at seventeen. Her body was tall. But her head was little and rounded and her face was rather soft in contrast to the firm, narrow lines of the rest of her. Quincy called her “Buttercup.” For her hair was gold and her cheeks were tanned and her eyes were green in the sun rather than blue.

But the unfortunate thing was that, although Quincy enjoyed all this, he seemed to be learning very little about the ultimate qualities of woman. He caught himself up at times, in his enjoyment. He seemed of the opinion that if he enjoyed himself, he could not profit. In this treasurable thought, a stain of schooling had indeed fixed on his else impervious nature.

With the heavy heat of August, when the trees turn purple and a translucent flame waves over nature and sears her gentle freshness, Quincy learned that in his rigid purpose he had failed altogether. He learned also that his mother had been silently right--just as often she had been volubly wrong. Clarice was become a part of the fire and fumes. He could not help this. But he could keep from seeing her so often. He resented her attraction. And with set teeth and a stern eye, he put a censorship upon their walks.

A few days later than Rhoda--in the height of August--Clarice also was leaving for the mountains. Rhoda and her husband approved of the Lodges.

“He is a big lawyer,” said he.

“She was a Querelton,” said she. And always, she had smiled when Quincy’s attention to a Querelton’s daughter came up to her notice.

“See her as much as you can;” she advised him once. “When she makes her début next season, you’ll not be looked at--I assure you. You know,” Rhoda turned to her mother, “the Lodges are coming to live in town next winter, just so that Clarice has a chance.”

This speech rankled Quincy and amazed him. He pondered it for some time, after the Crams had gone. When his wild flower “had a chance” to become a wired thing of wax, she would, then, welcome it? and he who must stand in her spirit for the scent of the moist fern and the dancing of the brook would not be noticed?

There were a few days left of Clarice when these words, spoken at random, crystallized their effect on Quincy. It was well in the period of holding off from Clarice--and of resentment that she should have given him so little knowledge, yet occupied so fiery a part within him. At once, his ardor and his curiosity re-kindled. He sought her out for a last walk in the woods.

Clarice told him that she was very busy packing. But she would take an afternoon from her important duty.

If she was reluctant, as he called her downstairs, so was the sun that came through the pervasive grey like a little shot of fire. They went forth, and the sun gave way, altogether, before the clouds.

It was evident to Quincy that Clarice was angry at his sudden lessening of attention. He did not know that this anger might have been adduced from the fact that his behavior left a void in her heart. He thought only her pride was injured. That was why he said, by way of buttress to it:

“I understand--Rhoda told me--you were going to live in New York next winter and have society.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Are you glad about dances and parties?”

Clarice puckered her pale-red lips. “No! I shall hate them.”

“Then,” Quincy went on, gladdened, “why are you going to do it?”

“You have to--of course. Everybody does.” Clarice talked as to one who could not possibly understand. And Quincy, acquiescent in the import of her tone, grew silent.

They wandered along a neglected road, half green with grass. A barbed wire fence straggled through the opaque bushes, laden with berries. They were walking rather more rapidly than their wont. It was as if the unconscious impulse of their limbs was to free each from the other. Quincy wore a grey, soft shirt. He had flared it at the throat, allowing his blue tie to fall low over his chest. Instinctively, his fingers groped to his neck, buttoned the collar close and drew up the tie.

“I’ve packed all my rompy clothes, Quint,” said Clarice, suggesting thereby that their ancient habit of striking across fence and meadow must be abandoned for want of a fit dress.

“Well, at least don’t let us rush so,” the boy said. “This is a bully road. Remember where it goes to? Three miles of rolling country and then that farm-house where they have the buttermilk.”

“Oh, my!” said Clarice, “I can’t go that far! There’s not time.”

All of the things she said were true enough--and pardonable. Yet in her manner, she seemed making stock of these unfortunate contingencies. It was this that hurt Quincy. He resolved to try again.

“Clarice dear,” he began, “if you knew why I’ve not seen you so much of late, you’d not be mad at me.”

“Who said I was mad at you?”

“Well--I meant--”

“Sometimes, you’re too funny for words, Quincy Burt,” said the girl, serious as a sermon.

“Oh--be quiet!” The boy rebelled at this suggestion of being laughed at, despite the lack of a particle of smile in her. “I’m glad you’re not mad. All I wanted to say was--was that--well--the reason I’ve seen you less is not that I like you less.”

Clarice took this in silence.

“Look here!” The boy turned to her roughly almost--and stopped walking. The girl, of course, stopped also. He was turned so that she faced him. And still, she was quiet.

“Clarice, don’t you like me, too?”

She met his face. It was very still and solemn. And the mouth quivered a bit, though he drew it close in order to control it. And the eyes were a very deep, piercing blue, indeed. It was the inevitable moment for seventeen girlish years to laugh.

“What do you think--you silly? Would I have seen you so much--?”

“Then, Clarice,” Quincy put his hands forward and broke in, so eager was he, “you _will_ see me, next winter?”

Of course, Clarice drew back, bodily, from his onrush. And of course, her words symbolized her action. It was nothing more.

“I shall be awful busy, Quint.”

They stood in the middle of the road. It was long and green and silent. A great elm, its trunk choking in poison-ivy, leaned over them. The boy grasped her shoulders and drew her toward him.

“Promise me, Clarice dear,--you’ll see me when I come to New York, next Christmas. Even with all the parties. Give me a kiss in promise.”

Her face was directly under his. And her lips were smiling. With no effort, he kissed them. They were cool and soft and pricking. It was as if he had kissed a smile. How different from this granted kiss had been the stolen one, of Rhoda! But now, her face was a little flushed and the smile was gone--as if he had kissed it away. Clarice fell back a step. And Quincy spoke though a bubble of warmth kept rising in his throat.

“That was a promise, Clarice?”

The girl frowned. “It was nothing of the sort!”

“Clarice!” he cried, in amazement.

But still she was angry. Her face was first red, then almost grey. “I’m going home,” she said and turned away.

Quincy reached for her fleeing waist and threw her back into his arms.

“You shan’t behave that way, toward me!”

“Shan’t I, though? Good-bye! You needn’t come along.” And once more she made a start.

The boy stopped her. He took her angrily and bent her backward, until her face was under his.

“If you behave like that, I’ll kiss you again!”

He kissed her--savagely. And Clarice, as before, lay there in his arms, almost unheeding. He kissed her again--tenderly. And then, he looked at her. The lips were parted and moist. Her spirit seemed slumbering beneath a covert. Only her mouth was a taste of it. Her eyes were meaningless. She was not beautiful after all.

He set her up once more upon her balance.

“You have promised me now--to let me see you next Christmas?”

Clarice straightened herself. “I have done nothing of the sort.”

She spoke with a wrinkle of her forehead and her kissed mouth dryly puckered. “Next Christmas--” she paused and tilted her head vaguely up with a distant look, “Next Christmas--who knows?”

“Then why,” said the angry boy, as he followed after her, “then why did you let me kiss you?”

This time, Clarice stopped.

“Are you sorry?” she asked.

“I most certainly am!” burst from him.

Unscathed, Clarice shrugged her shoulders.

They walked to her home, in silence.

“Good-bye,” said she.

“Good-bye,” said Quincy.

X

College once more.

It had the busy serenity of a bee hive. Its murmurous exclusiveness went against the vision of an outer world as a rebuke and a rebuff. But within the compact regions of honey and smug larvæ and pompous leaders, for those who were not really of it, however deeply in it, there was the quality of the sting.

Quincy came back, moved and settled within new chambers, and looked about him. A sophomore. The heir, that meant, of the hum and the comb and the autonomy--laden with the equally strict traditions to enjoy these and to perpetuate them. A generation of larvæ lay, already, cuddled underneath him. And without, there was the world to which no visit must be dreamed of, no glance directed, save as a place of furnishing and fodder for the hive. All of it stretched out, a mere subsidiary. Its flowers were servants, its fertility was impost to the hive. In it, as in his home, were cloying and shutting-out and a sting. These were the first impressions. They came without bidding. But Quincy was resolved not to be satisfied with such. He went forth, therefore, to look about him.

Perhaps his new instructor in English helped him as much as anything to bearings. His name was Egbert Simson. He was a graduate of the college. He had won honors in all the possible fields of it. He had won his letter in track; he had served on the college monthly; he had led his class in scholarship and presided over the college branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association, He was a perfect man. And now, he was a member of the faculty. In a year, he would have his doctor’s thesis. In five years, he would be grappling toward a professorship. In ten years, he would publish an edition of the Poems of Suckling. All his life he would continue humming and honey-gathering for the hive.

Quincy came to know him, sophomore year, in his capacity of preceptor. For each student had such a one. Early in the fall term, was the time when he had to see the estimable Simson--twice in two weeks. This served greatly, together with the general impression of the class.

Mr. Simson was tall and inclined to fullness of figure. His face had once had lines, hard and aplenty. But general happiness would soon abolish them to roundness. His little clear blue eyes shone forth from their soft frames with an easy prospect, as if they knew beforehand what they were going to see--and should somewhat else be there, they would simply refuse to see it. His nose was still straight, nor had the incipient rising fleshliness of his cheeks yet undermined its shallow impertinence. His lips were of the general blown-ness that smacked often, smiled at will and were not employed when a guttural throat-sound announced laughter. Mr. Simson’s forehead was narrow and smooth and round below his sleek brown hair. His hands were fat but the soft fingers tapered gently. In all of his being there glamored fluency, serenity and an inviolable blindness. This man was one of the favorite figures in the hive. His hum was forever marked and forever sought. If he had not been a male, one might readily have called him “Queen.” But even his maleness was unobtrusive, since the hive worshipped the more passive sort. Mr. Simson’s voice was soft and high. He was easily shocked and when he was, he wiggled his lissom form and threw back his perfectly rounded head. He was staid and Christian. It was meant to be quite evident that when he married the daughter of some affluent trustee, he would go to her in a state of virginity that would save her blushes. It was quite evident as well that he would never marry the daughter of any one less trustful and less affluent than a trustee. Mr. Simson lacked money. But it was known that several of his relations were financial kings. All of his friends, moreover, were as well chosen as his relations. And since he had not chosen his own father, one never heard of him. Mr. Simson, however, was far too proper not to be untiringly devoted to his mother. One heard often of that. Moreover, she had an infallible eye for trustfulness and affluence. Frequently she went along on a friend’s yachting tour with him.

On Mr. Simson’s more specific qualifications for teaching English literature, it would be sheer pedantry to dwell.

“You should see,” Quincy explained to Garsted, “with what scruples Simson discharges his duties as preceptor, toward me.” The boy laughed. “He can’t stand me.”

“I go into the study. Simson is at the desk--typing a sonnet for the Lit. ‘Oh, good day, Mr. Burt,’ without getting up, ‘and what is there this morning?’ I give him the papers. Without looking at them he signs them. ‘I am convinced, Mr. Burt, they are as they should be.’ There is at least one ‘Mr. Burt’ in every sentence. I am about to leave and a qualm catches him. He smiles and when he smiles his round face breaks into two triangles with the nose as the common base. ‘Does my class satisfy you, Mr. Burt?’ he asks. As the result of that question, he tells the others at the Graduates’ Club how frankly he takes each student into his confidence--asks their advice.”

“Yes,” interrupted Garsted, “they despise Deering, but they all imitate him. Well?”

“Well--I answer: ‘Mr. Simson, why did we skip _The Miller’s Tale_? I think it is one of the best Chaucer wrote.’ ‘It is good,’ he answers, tapping a finger on his mahogany desk--yes, there’s a huge seal ring on the tapping finger--‘It is good, Mr. Burt, but it’s unpleasant; it is coarse. We must remember that sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings,’ I was sure he was going to say _Mr. Chaucer_, since he despised him too, ‘sometimes Chaucer’s surroundings got the upper hand of his good taste. Despite its matter, that tale is good. For Chaucer was a genius. He could not help making even a licentious story interesting and human.’”

Here Garsted roared: “_Even_ a licentious story! The old hypocrite! You know Simson, my dear Quint. You saw his human little eyes and his round lips and his belly--at twenty-seven! Do you think that is his real opinion of a licentious story?”

“I know it isn’t,” answered Quincy. “Several of the boys whom he cares for--Society brothers of course--were repeating some of his own jokes. I heard them.”

“Ugh--let’s have lunch,” said Garsted.

Not alone diffidence held Quincy from calling on the Deerings until late October. His own turmoiled spring and summer had indeed made him unsure of himself toward them and hence unsure of them toward him. It is hard for the man whose sleep has been wracked with dreams to understand the serenity of sleep of the one beside him. So Quincy restrained his impulse to seek out the great man and his wife. He wished, moreover, to adventure a trifle more in the atmosphere of college. He seemed seriously firm and set and steady there. He enjoyed this new sensation. He was afraid lest the Deerings show up its superficial strength. This, of course, was a fear he did not avow to himself. His affairs, his reluctance to seem too pressing in his return sufficed for the admitted reasons. And meanwhile he was able to bask in his new sense of self-dominion.

Garsted had grown aware of this.

“You’re a different man,” he remarked to him; “you must have had a successful love affair this summer.”

“You’re wrong, Simon,” replied Quincy, who was so well over the skirmish with Clarice as not to resent allusion to it.

“Then there was a girl. And didn’t you kiss her?”

“I did.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Is that success?” asked Quincy.

“Rake!” Garsted misunderstood him. And Quincy blushed. Here again, it was impossible to go farther even with his dearest friend.

But at length, one evening, the need of going to the little box-frame house came over Quincy. It was at dinner. There had been six weeks in which to go; yet he had not gone. And now, it seemed imperative that he must go--and that he must, at once. He rushed through his meal, half eating it. He ate his slice of beef, neglected the vegetables and then, when it was too late, found himself still hungry and gulped two cups of coffee whose heat displeased him. A great worry gripped him--lest they be out--or the evening inopportune. He might telephone; no, he did not dare to. He might wait until a surer time; no, he was not able to. He must go, this night. And if the evening was ill, so would be the omen. Was it that of a sudden, his new impression of college was digested and fresh food craved,--that, psychically, he had been released once more for living, now that the state of dormancy (called strength) was over?

Howbeit, Quincy went. He found the Professor and his wife alone and ready to receive him. And when, at eleven, he returned campus-ward through the crisp shadows, the impression of the six fresh weeks came at length to a formed consciousness within him.

In this way was that evening a peak whence he was able to look back upon the path he had just come, and forward upon the path ahead. And from its relative height, both paths were new and clear before him. Even so, as the climber stands upon an eminence does he descry for the first time the way that he has taken and view that past with the same eye of interest wherewith he peers into the future.

It was as if the boys, his classmates, stepped outward from their general hum, disintegrated and took on a clear dimension. He saw them now as a seed that the wind would scatter. He felt them as plants that a varied, self-sufficient soil would wrench to its own uses. He knew the blindness of the seed and the planned frailty of this little circled harbor holding it up for the air’s sowing. He respected everything save the boys’ pretensions, save the false eternity of the fragile harbor. He saw the bloomless death that there would be, were these pretensions even tinged with the truth. He wondered at the need of these pretensions. He despised the powers--the faculty--that bred them in order to slough over their own crass sterility.

He could not hold to this sudden and veracious vision. Himself intruded. His strong impressions, so flecked and bulged, were of less value and a greater interest. Here then, was he, among the disintegrated boys--among the seed. But with that instant, he could not go on. The boys faded back into the general hum. He did not seem to stand among them, to have an independent contact with them, to be even clearly outside of them. His mind failed to view simply him and them alone. It gave no response to this relation, it left no mark to fix on, no ring to hear as a tonality.

At once, Quincy veered back to the couple he had left--and however he approached himself, there were they, also.

The evening had been auspicious. Since he had ruled--an aboriginal residue in him--that an ill evening should augur ill, surely it was right to read a happy omen from a happy time. Quincy did not hesitate. As he walked home down the silent avenue where the black trees murmurously bent upon the lights, he was convinced. His firmness and grip had not gone from him! He was elated--yet certain of himself. And all of that last spring and summer, he had been a fool.

The three had talked together. And it had been natural to remain till late. There had been no sign of fire or haze or friction. As he sat there, he had seemed lifted up. The supple, blue steel of the Professor’s mind had seemed the girders of a firmament whose life-invigorating breath was Julia. There had seemed no crass way of differentiating them. Of course, one was star-metal; the other was æther. But together, they had made the firmament. And within this, he had taken breath and heart. Quincy saved himself from angry laughter at his early qualms and worries and presentiments by promptly forgetting most of them. This is a common function of forgetting--to save from angry laughter. He had blithely become unaware of the intangible misgiving which like a cancer, for all its formlessness, had gnawed into the marrow of the months preceding. He had launched upon an era of confidence and dreaming. He had no inkling of the sheer dogged resolution it had required to swing his rumbling energies from their near concrete pasture into those hinterlands of fantasy and rationalization. He did not guess that this sudden melting of past worries was caused by the laborious effort of his spirit to transform itself from the true state in which such worries could be prompted--that his fresh certainty of life was due to a quick leap from the realities which must be doubtful, to dreams fashioned at will to exclude doubt. The realities were to have their revenge. The dreams, formed as an escape from them, were to be found fitless and wanting. Meantime, however, Quincy tramped bravely down the shadowed street.

Of course, much truth lay in this fresh construed idealism; much health was in this sublimation of his energies. No long process in human nature can omit any part of human nature. A pondered crime has, in its texture, whatever of good or truth the criminal conceal. A deed of service hides all the infirmities and selfishness of the noble man. So, this long grown flower in Quincy, blossoming now in a period of exultant confidence, had come not only from his need of harbor for himself and of translating a truth to fancy, but as well from his rich fund of spirit and his deep strain of nature. His dream as he nursed it, now, was in good sooth extravagant. But the wildest dream has its root in the truth; and the most mendacious is a mere branching out from a confession.

Quincy, then, with his second year at college, revelled in a philosophy. Like all personal things at nineteen years, it was very concise and pointed, left to its own ways; and very vague when he endeavored to articulate it. Quincy of course could not admit this to himself. So when Garsted was dubious or unconvinced, he blamed Garsted’s obtuseness to spiritual things and withdrew farther from the realities.

The authorship of Deering in most of his ideas was manifest. The Professor was welcome in this capacity. Quincy did not object to a descent from such. Of course, Julia had no conscious part. He was the steel; she at best was color. He knew her now as a splendid woman, as a fit mate for a great man. That he had ever doubted this fitness or this harmony or this completeness was as far from Quincy as the once real days when he had lain as a center-presence in his crib. Yet, all of these truths remained. He was, of course, like all of us, still a center-presence to himself; he was of course, like all of us, a doubter of the otherness in a thing desired. But for the moment these truths were latent.

There had been real fire beneath the smoke that had blurred his past spring and summer. But Quincy was in a state where fire is denied and the smoke blown off by a new draught of energy that gains its intensity through a clear heat. All misgivings, then, about the Deerings went. And went as well, his misgivings about himself, his misgivings about life.

“A new accomplishment of Quincy,” said Rhoda that Christmas; “he’s become conceited.”

The creed of Professor Deering was unmistakable. Nor did Quincy mistake it. He mistook merely himself in believing he had adopted it, because a corner of his being--his intellect--had managed to nod “Yes” to it.

The creed was big and simple like the man that lived it. It was a thoroughfaring, militant idealism, a sublimation indeed throughout the sensory gamut of fact to truth. In it, Lawrence Deering careered, and toward it loved to tender by the hand those about him who were willing. It transfigured the smallest things of life; thereby the smaller souls grew aware of it. It flowed over everything like a fine mist at sunrise, yet protruded nowheres against force; thereby the small souls were made tolerant. The Professor was not molested at college. He was not molested at home. When a barrier came against the spirit’s flow, it wafted over. It had filled Quincy like a meadow, rough with low shrubs to hold it. He was already known in his class as one of the inevitable Deering disciples. A few each year--from the class standpoint--“went wrong” this way, even as a few each year “went wrong” with women. To the busy, humming majority who never took his courses, Deering was an endemic problem. Like the poets--Browning or Francis Thompson--who write nonsense, he had a national renown. But these were their inner confessions. To the world, these very philistines, in boasting of their Alma Mater, would have made much of Professor Deering.

It was, then, chiefly charged with the Professor, that Quincy began his period of effervescence. He now denied all troubles by fitting them into the scheme of “inevitable good.” He denied all evils by stalking so far beyond the mass as to catch its “inevitable harmony.” He overlooked all barriers by soaring so high as to see only the globe’s “inevitable curves.” He was radiant with the same vigor grown extensive which, while intensive, had made him gloomy. He was perfectly able, in these days, to argue the rightness of injustice--viewed in its propulsion of virtue; or the beauty of ugliness--as a part of nature’s composition. These were the days when he was consciously “vibrant to the whole” and when a deed was _pragmatic_ instead of practical. Sex, moreover, was a germ that might “push upward into a flower”; there was an ideal conduit leading from “mortal brain to infinite mind”; matter was a “badge”; Christ’s import was not in his ethics but in his “substantiation of the spiritual,”--and before the advent of Deering the greatest men of the world had been merely steps in the preparation.

Innumerable concepts taken from the Professor and studdings of amplification and conclusion--his own part, mostly,--stood on the surface of Quincy’s soul and made faces at reality. Family became a cot he had left, finding it narrow and moist and over-rich in covers. College was a big emptiness in which a few true accents rang the more truly because of the acoustic of that emptiness. Quincy himself, it was plain, was a man of sensitive depths.

There then, were all these trappings and borrowings and mind-absorptions upon the surface of his soul, grimacing at the world and hiding what lay behind from the world’s onslaught. But the world had already shot its shaft and made a piercing with its seed. It might stay out now--shooed off effectually by all these grimaces--and laugh. For it was destined to laugh last. It had done its part. Quincy’s soul, in its too late seclusion, would unassisted perform the rest. It could only guard--it could not undo--the future.

So the boy went blandly on, with his ideals and his sublimations,--nurturing, the while, the fruit of his past intercourse with life.

XI

There were sublime moments in that period--moments that were sparks for later fires and that abided with him until the end.

Professor Deering had said to him: “The atheist is a man in whom a sense is lacking.”

Armed with this, Quincy went forth into the night to be alone with it. He sought a terrain that he already knew. The road crawled out of the town at a low incline. And then, abrupt from it, rose a path over a hill that was clad thick in summer. Now, it lay naked above the squatting road--a vast blue grey, a round of briar stalks and matted underbrush that sang with his racing feet. Upon the summit was a rock that Quincy loved. From one approach it was sheer and rugged. Beyond, a cleft in it, deepened with soil, curved gently down to a copse of elder bushes. From its sheer corner rose an oak tree. Several new tufts sprang from its foot. Above twined ivy and at the top a blaze of quartz, set in the granite, made a seat so that the hill’s declivity rolled away from the eyes to a distant murmurous valley. Here, flashing in sun or moonlight, one caught the river--agleam through its thick marge of summer, or swift and sleek without hindrance for the eye when the gaunt trees of winter basketed its flow.

Upon the rock, now, Quincy sat and shivered a bit and looked up at the frozen stars and the steely pool of heaven and asked to sense God.

Everything stood in silence. The voice of the forest was in the silence like the grain in a smooth surface,--perceptible but without harm to it. And such a surface, so fretted by innumerable stirrings, was the silence. Quincy huddled low, head forward, and let the silence enter and pervade him. At last he was drenched with it. And now, it frightened him no longer. He felt free, now, to career in it; since he was part of it, he could go forth beyond it and hear the voice it scabbarded. While his heart had beat against it, he had sat there, strangely afraid and alien to it all. But now, his heart rhythmed to its measure so that he heard it beat no longer. Now, his soul was swathed and soaked to its color, so that he could mount upon the silence and traverse it without sinking, and attain beyond. He and the silence were one. He, then, could know what it knew; feel the purple flame that gave it forth; and sense the slow-moving pulse of which its undulant shadows were a shroud.

With his eyes so freed, Quincy looked up, his head no longer stiffly straining forward.

* * * * *

And then, slowly, like the colors of sunset upon the eastern sky, it came to him. A fibre here, in his soul; a dart there, of fire, and beyond, over a space of grey, a shred of light. Until at last, like the glow of the hid sun below the land, all of him was athrob and painted with it, all of him flamed and sang and quickened to it. There against the stars; there in the deep mazes where other stars lay drowned like pearls in wine; there in that hinted ecstasy of space before which the vibrant lights were hung like a fine girdle before a quivering passion.

And below sat Quincy, breathing a calm breath, knowing no cold, no fear, no strangeness--in communion....

His soul loosed within him. Without pain, it broke the bonds of body and went forth. The firm air was an illimitable path, whose boundlessness pointed one way toward that which made it as a candle’s flash, short and ephemeral. All of the world breathed and rolled underneath. All of the world and its firm atmosphere--he saw it swinging eastward, away from the night and toward the long-set sun that it must meet again at dawn. He rested above the rock and above the hill. But beyond him were the stars and the veiled voice, so that he also swung--back, back, back ... to meet the morning.

And so poised, in tremulous unison with the earth and the other stars, he rested--while below, vaguely, he was aware of his crouched body and his burning eyes....

* * * * *

A tuft of wind fingered his hair. It tumbled against his forehead. The soft bonds of his body clamped close upon his soul. Like a dream on waking, the stars retreated; and as they went, closed in to an infinitude of hopeless depth the subtle Hand that had drawn him forth with its own ecstasied advance.

He sat there, cold under the heavens. A fresh wind pierced him. He shivered with it. He arose. He sought out the squatting road that tumbled back into the town. And he was glad to find it; glad of the vulgar lights that blinked against the noiseless houses, glad of the rattle of the car that brought bed nearer.

Like a magnet had the Hand drawn from him that which could be at home with silence and the stars. And like the tremor of a harp, the voice came on the wind:

“I keep you until each time that you seek Me. Then, shall you come forth and receive.”

XII

The rift was started by a visit home.

The Burts had moved into an apartment near the Hudson. In fact, from the windows of the drawing room and sitting room one’s sight dodged several towering structures and met the river, flat and cool below the city. Beyond, rose the serried strokes of the Palisades, purple for the most part, athwart the blue haze of New York.

It was a splendid apartment and Quincy’s family had moved to it after his return to college. So this was his first view. All the old furniture was gone. Sarah and Adelaide had had a fresh start. The seven years since Harriet therefore marked their change in the new trappings. For these years had nourished Adelaide. And her word was final in all things pertaining to the household. Long since, Sarah had sighingly accepted that “she had no heart” to manage servants nor the “trumpery” to decorate a parlor. It was by savage encroachments of this sort upon her ancient territory, that Sarah’s languor and decomposition were effected. It requires intellect to be a happy idle woman.

As they sat down to dinner something in the room’s blatancy gave the boy pause--rendered cloud-like the texture of the life he had been living. The room was panelled high in oak. The inevitable favrille-glass inverted bowl loomed over the table. Above, at the ceiling, was another cluster of lights. These shed their unimaginative glow. And the chandelier was dark. It seemed menacing to Quincy, like a rich thing without a spirit. But it was indefeasibly real. There was a side-board, also of oak, cut by a swinging door, radiant with silver. Upon the mantel stood four porcelain vases which Sarah had seen and rebelliously acquired. They were the room’s rococo residue--and the sole things in it Sarah could warm up to. They shrieked with their dove-blue and their rose-pink against the room’s sombre munificence. Between them stood a chaste, dull wooden clock--by Thomas, whose every tick was a protest against its neighbors.

Quincy was oppressed once more. He wished to get away. His afflatus seemed asthmatic in this rigid air. In sympathy, he almost liked the towering porcelain vases. They, at least, with their quaint scrollings and flutings, seemed to aspire upwards. The rest of the room’s dead perfection was a dead weight downward. It lacked even the falsetto spirit of the vases. The family teased Sarah about them. And Quincy took his mother’s part. This troubled Adelaide to silence. Marsden seldom stooped to teasing, Josiah had leaned on Adelaide and Jonas was busy eating. So Quincy’s word won the day for the rococo vases.

What was this acrid reality within his mother that brooked no blinking and ate into the substance of his dreams? Why did she make something--of all people--totter within him? Was she more _real_ than the rest of the world? He could laugh at _it_!

Quincy went back to college, militant more than ever against her, yet unknowing of how great a tribute this militancy was. She was indeed more real within him than the rest of the world he laughed at. For we laugh only at things outside of us. The man lies who says he has laughed at himself--save his laughter be hysterical. Quincy could not laugh at his mother, for she was of him. But he could deny her, despise her, rail against her.

In this spirit of idealism, he returned to college.

And now, began the subtle _dégringolade_ toward the great cross-road where Quincy was to meet himself. The stone that starts an avalanche need not be at the summit of the precipice. It may lie far down toward the valley. And its crumbling may unleash, farther and farther upward, stone after stone, in indirect progression, until the top be loosed and the whole mountain-side crush downward. But long ere this the lowly stone that started will lie buried in the valley. Such a stone was Sarah.

She lay low in the slope of her boy’s emotions. And as her stirring loosed the soil above her, she was the first to be overwhelmed. Quincy had suffered a sharp, rude shock in this reality of which she was the basis--the family that he had looked on as an outgrown cradle! This reality, the juices of his dream-life could not digest. As he left home, he therefore made his effort to cast it out. All this came rationally to the surface in fault-finding. But in the effort of rejection, a shock tremored through all of the boy’s factitious structure. And this shock was to have sequels.

Julia reappeared in his dreams. Quincy instinctively feared an omen. Almost at once, Julia was no more in his dreams. He began to dream of Rhoda and of bloody scenes wherein his father suffered--nightmares in which an anonymous woman lurked vaguely, clothed in the mystery of prize and instigator. Then came a time when he could not catch his dreams at all. As he awoke, there in his mind would lift a smoke of struggle. But as he grasped at it, it went and underneath was nothing.

Meantime, the year wore away. Christmas vacation happened. Quincy experienced a radiant New Year. For naught took place. His projection of dream had the æther to itself. There were no obstructions great enough to make him conscious that he was gliding--that the avalanche had subtly started. His mother had been ill and was South during the holidays. This may have saved him. But howsoever, the New Year came radiant upon its tracks of ice.

* * * * *

With January, there was an afternoon that revealed many things already long alive.

It was the first “tea” with Julia Deering since the last May. In Quincy’s still confident state this fact required no comment beyond the probability that she had had no inclination or no time for him, alone. Her previous favors in this light called neither for sequel nor for conclusion. He went that afternoon then, splendidly at ease, eager by anticipation to show his friend how full and serious a man he was. He knew he must impress her. And in that impress, she would see the handwork of her husband. This must delight a devoted spouse.

Quincy did not recall, even, as he rang the bell, how he had come that first time, a year since. His grip on memory was of rare efficiency. This grip it was, forsooth, that made the delusion possible of his grip on life. There was no happy mean in Quincy’s nature. He had suffered through too wide a surface of fine feeling. His memory had been too keen to suggest ways in which the present and the future might attack him. Too great had been his liking to an exposed nerve. And now, there was no surface at all for life to sting, no memory at all for life to grope by, no meeting on life’s plane. He was beyond the rule of the realities. He was a boy, nursing his spirit. And no more unreal being can be found in the vast Mirage called Truth.

As he came, then, that day, to chat and perhaps clumsily gulp down his tea, a subtle streak fenced off the real Quincy from the conscious one. These two mingled their accents. To the thoughts of the one, the other expressed speech; to the feelings of the other, the first gave utterance. And at times, the lips and the hearts of each made instantaneous counterpoint. The harmony of all this was minor. A mere thread of vibrance often drew the line between them. And in such faint distinctions, voiced at once, lies discord. Music, builded upon this searching wisdom, Quincy had not failed to love, that night at the Deering party. The subtle barriers of its sound, thrown together into a stirring discord, had gone forth and understood him. Julia had not loved the music. But here, played on this gentler instrument, the same, weird, lingering detonations gripped and swayed her. At last, in his gestures and his words and the flash of his eyes, the Modern Music was articulate enough for her to hear.

From the point of her reception, of her vibration in response, life turned to red for Quincy. For it is dangerous in a boy to be as music for a woman.

But meantime, he chatted blandly and balanced his uncomfortable tea-cup and was assured of the depths of his composure.

They sat in her room. The door into the study was shut. But the Professor was out.

She wore a dress of faint blue crêpe, with still gentler streakings of orange. The bodice was caught high under her arms by a double seam. Here, an elastic drew the dress close to her body. Her black hair was knotted low so that the two coils of it above her ears which he had previously noticed, were not in evidence. Now her ears were covered. The hair lay flat, cutting apart from the center of her forehead. In this way, its cold, froward whiteness and her eyes’ warm depths came to accentuation.

As the boy sat with her, a delicate aroma seemed to flow into him from her. He could almost fix its point of issuance--her tantalizing, tight corsage. It held him firmly, like a soft bond that gives but cannot break.

And as she sat with him, it came to Julia Deering with irresistible force, that here was a sensitive mind which would receive whatever she might choose to grant. It is hard to withstand this feeling--when one is dizzy with being straight--of a great, free depth to fall in. It is the sensation of the weary man before the brink of the precipice--of one whose muscles ache from holding him so long erect. Below, there lies a patch of cool waters and fanning trees. Upon the rock, the sun sears and the shadows cannot live.

A remark of his started her upon that inevitable forward lurch--the giving way to self-confession. And for an hour, Quincy heard, his eyes steadfast, as if he feared that the least movement would break the charm.

She saw him preponderant, as she spoke. And his sight was the tonal of her words. He leaned forward in his chair. His legs huddled beneath him. In one bony, knotted hand--throughout that hour--a cup was held with its remnant of tepid tea. And his lank body stood out, loose and tense, responsive infinitely, yet lost clumsily within his blue serge suit. His face was a little drawn. But his eyes beat the measures as she talked, with the gentle drooping of their lids as a point went home, and with a sudden fire as she left a conclusion for his delicacy. His lips, all of this time, moved also. They would lie parted. And then, he would slowly moisten them with his tongue, purse them, as if to strangle a tell-tale quiver, and once more let them fall faintly away from his control, until again his interest parched them.

What she told him was nothing. What she made him know was fraught with fever. It was as if a burning rod had struck clear through his pretty treasury of cobwebs and scalded them away. Where they had been--gleaming in the sun of his conceit like a fine lacework--remained an emptiness that ached.

Quincy said little in response. The woman smiled at his silence and his lack of judgment.

“I must go now.” He suddenly jumped up.

She also rose. She came beside him. And the mist of her bodice came over him afresh.

“Do--if you wish to,” she said, quite close to him.

He moved toward the door.

“Good-bye,” she stopped him. Her tone had the lilt of two rhythms intertwined--a conversational happiness and a pathetic fatalism forcing it. She held out her hand.

Quincy grasped it. It was soft at the first touch, and then, in the ensuing instant, fearfully strong and masterful.

After that, he was in his rooms. He was unconscious of having walked there.

Here, then, was Quincy face to face with a problem.

For what Julia Deering, saying no thing, had given him to know was that her married life had been an endless failure and that, within the great man, was a limited creature--not cruelly so, not deliberately so, of course--but yet a creature who could deny and crush and misunderstand another!

His room, waiting for him, as he entered it, had the air and nature of a mighty list. There was naught to do but to step up and prepare for battle. The pictures on the walls, the books he loved in their racks, the letter he had just received from Adelaide, the bed in the alcove--everything alive there, seemed tense and expectant, concentrated on him. He had read of ancient tournaments. Here was his gallery, looming about him, with intricate weavings of smile and scowl, a mass of emotional tangents; yet unisoned all in the word it spoke:

“We watch you, now. It is your turn.”

* * * * *

The first phase of the conflict lasted two weeks. It began largely with cautious measurings of mount and lance. And of course, these gained nothing. They were signs of a deep reluctance for a clash--finger-feelings and toe-feelings where the truth called for blood and body. They measured nothing.

Out of this phase, Quincy emerged, equally undoubting of Julia’s truthfulness and of Professor Deering’s greatness. And a new discretion was born in him. Why should he endeavor to solve this problem? What was it to him? He could not help. He would be broad--and ignore both sides. In this serene state, he went back to the box-frame house.

“I am afraid,” she said to him, “from the way you acted, you may have misunderstood my words. I was mistaken to talk to you at all. Some of you is so old--but the conscious part of you is so very young!”

Quincy protested that he was inimitably broad--broad enough to ignore both sides. These were of course not his words. But Julia also was receiving, now, not what he spoke but what he gave her to know. They changed the subject. They talked of books and of music. She was her old commanding self. He understood what this meant: that she once more despised him.

The Professor entered.

“Hello! Hello!” he cried. “Stay to supper, Mr. Burt. Can he, Julia?”

“Why, Lawrence,--we’re going out.”

Professor Deering was caught up by this rebuke. For he knew that they were not going out. Soon, he left them.

“That was a lie--about our going out,” she said, at once, “But I am not sure, Quincy, that you quite deserve to dine, at present, at the Professor’s table.”

With this twist of her two-edged sword, she let him go.

It was all plain enough to Quincy now. His ignoring both sides had been ignorance. And ignorance meant weakness. The finger-feeling stage was dead.

Down this new slope, events continued until March. He did not return to her. He saw the Professor only casually. But the sight of either was unnecessary. There was progress without them. The conflict was really on. The boy lumbered out his musty weapons of ideals, groaningly shouldered them and so fell to, against the seething, searing inroads of the enemy.

Of course, of all this there could be no word with Garsted. Quincy was inarticulate enough by nature, of his realities. But to talk of a deep thing that was still chaos in him was impossible. For silence, he did not have to lean on an ideal of chivalry. The stoppage caused by his other ideals sufficed for that. So the boy withdrew utterly. He was alone. And this he felt with a twinge of self-commiseration. His friend, also, felt something.

“My dear Quint,” he said, “you are become like a sounding cave--which gives forth from its mouth only a lugubrious counterpart of what is spoken to it.”

“Talk sense, Simon.”

Quincy was at his desk, doing a page of Cicero’s immortal tract _On Friendship_. His coat was on the floor near a chair where he had meant to throw it. He wore a plain white shirt with a soft collar. His chest and shoulders ridged fluently. He looked strong and at ease. Garsted sprawled, head up, mouth open, on the window seat. One leg lay high over the other knee. He was smoking a pipe.

“All right,” he said; “--what the devil’s wrong?”

“Nothing, old man.”

“Now you’ve delivered yourself of the conventional denial, dispense with the conventional ten pages of hesitation and come to the avowal.”

“I am not a character in a novel.” Quincy was incensed.

“You don’t talk enough to be a character in a play.”

“I’ll say anything you want. Only you’ve got to tell me what it is you want.” Quincy went ahead gingerly, for he felt his guilt.

Garsted rolled over to face him, on his cushioned window-seat.

“Very well,” he said, “first of all--close your book.” The boy complied. “Now listen. We are going to reverse the order of examination. I shall tell you your symptoms. And you shall tell _me_ what they mean.”

They were quite ordinary things, Garsted had found in Quincy. But they flattered him. That his eyes were given over to sudden reveries, that he spoke strangely cynical doubts about humanity, that he seemed only partially present in discussions which formerly he had entered with a whole spirit--these qualities, seen in him by a friend, resolved themselves to Quincy into an aura of mystic and romantic import. He was very happy to be so enigmatic. He began to feel that his was a beautiful dilemma. These were of course the days before that dilemma really gripped him. So he beamed on Garsted who had just accused him of being emotional in his statements and shoddy in his observations--as if he had been flattered.

“I am sure, Simon,” he said, “I can’t help you. Since you’ve done the symptoms, you’ll have to do the diagnosis also.”

“Well!” Garsted stretched, yawned and jumped up, “I guess perhaps it is nothing after all but the spring fever a month too early. Good-bye.”

And Quincy despised him for being so easily satisfied, so lightly affected at the end, in this outward mystery of his soul. Had he known Garsted would drop his inquiry so soon, he would have made his reticence more savory with a few gleams of the great truth.

Here then, he was--alone with himself, and the rustiness of his armor beginning to scratch and shriek.

He had a month of this. And when, at the end of it, a note from Julia marked still another phase, matters were at least more clearly before him, even if he had not resolved them. It was a step to have reconnoitred his position,--however far he was from having fathomed it.

* * * * *

Plainly, his ideals and aspirations lined out before him, with the Professor as their captain and their priest. And as flatly on the other side, stood Julia with her deep heart and her still soul and her cherished charm, reaching within him also. Within these antipodes was all of him, needing, in order to embrace them all, to reconcile them and make them one. Did they really destroy each other? Did they deny each other? Did they drive home the wrongness to some part of him who craved them all? Why did the whole of him seem shaken, if any part of his possession in these two threatened to disappear? What lay beneath his grim resolve to save them both, prove them both right, prove them both one--these antipodes? If the meat of his convictions lay really in him, why this desperate need of saving them? Were they merely a treasure he loved, or a prop of all his structure? And if a prop, why should they not be steadfast, unified, as a prop must be? Why was recognizing one needfully a blow to the other? Why could he not take his treasures blindly, like the rest of the world, and forget about them?

Pathetic little gained him his unceasing questions. There in his soul, the insidious, beautiful woman and the man who embodied the one program of happiness he had ever known, seemed grimacing and threatening. In the man, he had learned a technique of happiness; in the woman found a field for exercising his new, life-giving powers. By all the laws of justice, these two should smile upon each other, be supplements in an eternal concord. Yet here they were, plotting mutual destruction! And in his need of saving them both, Quincy was fighting for the one strain of happiness he had ever had. Without the way, what was the means? Without the means, how empty was the way! And more. How could he place his faith in the one, if by so doing, it destroyed the necessary other?

Quincy sensed his quandary. He must be faithful endlessly to him, in order to have faith in her. Yet, in receiving her with what she gave him, where went the faith in him? It was as if the moon, which has her light from the sun, should say:

“If you would have my light, first you must destroy the sun.”

In Quincy’s ideal world, the problem was just so unreal and just so reasonless. Yet--though he argued it away into non-existence--there it was! A sun that would not shine, save he denied the moon; and a moon that left dark the night, save he destroyed the sun through which not alone the day but herself had come to life! The petty wisdom of the savage, Quincy did not possess. For the young race, in its tactful henotheism, says by day: “O sun, thou art the one God”--and by night: “O moon, thou alone reignest.” But Quincy had gone beyond such paltry compromise. Morality and faith and an inflexible law buoyed him up. By all means and forever, his sun and moon _should_ shine at once--and side by side--in the astonished heavens. He would have it so! With commendable courage, he set about his task.

Any little human spark may strike clear to heaven. And it is probable that heaven linked up the immemorial conflicts of the stars and of the races of men, with this infinitely small yet infinitely old attempt of Quincy’s to wed what he wanted, with what he had.

Like a somnambulist, he had tasted a balm in his walking-sleep. His waking had ever been so painful! And now, again, his eyes were being opened. Surely, he would fight well for his dreams!

In March, came the note from Julia.

Professor Deering had gone to Chicago. Here, for two weeks, he was to represent his college at a conference. Quincy was bidden to dinner. He was told that they would be alone.

He went, armed with his resolution to beat down as superficial and untrue, any discrepancy between his ideal and his reality. He was eager to go, yet fearful. Knowledge had pricked him that this woman could do with him, according to her will; and that her will might disagree with his.

She received him, in a simple, straight-cut, black gown--caught up close, like all her garments, below her breast--a soft and singing thing. Quincy was in a dinner coat which he had had two years and had outgrown. The padded shoulder and artificial box effect made his slenderness seem gaunt. But he was really pale.

It was a plain meal and took little time. There was no wine. And, with academic grace, Julia Deering carved the chicken and served the fruit, herself. But when Quincy arose from the table, he was flushed and exalted as if the little supper had been a feast. A glow fretted the green pallor of his cheeks.

He followed Julia into her room and sank upon the primmest chair, holding his knees. When she went to light a lamp, he did not offer to assist her. He watched her supple figure bend over the table. He saw the gap caused by her posture, between her breast and the garment. The glow gave a red note to her hair. Then, she passed him, her dress forever singing, and composed herself upon the couch--cushions supporting her back and one of gleaming copper, which she had carefully smoothed, before her to rest her hand. The other arm was flung behind her head. She faced him, erect from her waist, with her gown lost in the shadow.

“What have you done, this last month?” she suddenly asked. “Have you been thinking of me?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“And what have you been thinking?”

“I’ve been wondering why you liked me.”

“Should I tell you?” She questioned him with her eyes also. “I like you because you are all in the future. When women get to be my age, they love to feel that they have a hold on the future. I am thirty-two,” she laughed.

“I don’t understand,” he stammered.

“You are a bit of my future,” she went on, “you shan’t ever lose the trace of me that I shall put in you. In that way, some of me has its youth still before it.”

Quincy had no impulse to break his silence. She continued. The lamp burned against her face, for him; against his face, for her. The room rolled away from it in a warm shadow.

“Can you deny that a trace of me will be indelible in you? I understand you so. Tell me, my boy--am I not the first woman who was ever kind to you?”

All of his manful air died out. There were tears in his eyes. He had thought of mentioning the girl he had kissed--and Adelaide, and mother. But he was afraid she might laugh.

“Do not think less of my kindness, Quincy, because I mentioned it.”

These words came low, and that which followed fitted almost into the shadows, so warm and still was it.

“You have been kind to me. You have helped me also--more than I ever can help you. I need you to be kind to, Quincy.”

He gazed at her. Her eyes came straight and true to him. There was no doubting them. And in the vibrance of their aim, they rang upon the flint of his old challenge. Thus it was that his words came sudden, unpremeditated, hard.

“And your husband--?” he asked.

Her face did not move, save for her mouth which closed as if it had been stung. Then, again, it parted.

“Lawrence lives entirely in his ideas. A woman is no idea. Neither is a child.”

“A child--” he cried. At once, she caught him up, crystallizing his presentiment of what she meant into a certainty.

“Yes, Quincy--” she spoke in a biting tone, “I have no child.”

But even his certainty required propping, so vast was the weight of dream and fancy which tumbled on it. He raked at her heart with a clumsy savagery.

“Did you--did you want--?”

“It would have been something,” she broke in, “to have been kind to. Do you understand? It would have been kind to give me that.”

Again, the silence, while she sat looking at him, gently poised, one hand pressed sensuously down within its copper setting, the other dull behind her hair, and all of her body a vague rhythm within the shadows.

Quincy was looking within himself. His task, in that tense moment, was there to find himself and to give her what he found. He felt that his word must be the next. He felt that it must be sincere. Surely, she would judge him by it. He was resolved that it should serve them well.

Within the brief space of stillness, what did he find? A great pain for himself, in this tearing predicament, that faded utterly before the pain of her who had bared it for him. A great gratitude born of this offering. A blind rush of resolution searing his mind like lightning, that she should receive what she desired, though his life and his dreams tottered for his gift! A vague thrill of the need of risk and of its beauty.

He knew that he must accept ere he could give. And though, within the press of that brief pause, no mind or thought could turn about, he must elect--must place the treasures of his life upon a pin-point altar, and give her all--or the smoke--incense--of that All’s destruction.

His word was this:

“You may be kind to me.”

She took it in. “Come here,” she said.

He came beside her--awkward.

“Give me a kiss,” she commanded. And her lips waited.

He bent over and kissed her. An agony flashed through the back of his neck--an agony for more.

“That kiss was a promise?” she asked.

His heart faltered. “A promise--of what?”

“Kiss me again!”

This time, his knees sank upon the couch. His arms went out and he clasped her, cool and piercing, to himself. His breathing allowed no word.

“Was that kiss a promise?” she repeated.

“Everything--” he stopped himself.

There she was, still poised in her throne, unruffled, unmoved. But no! He looked at her bosom. She, also, was breathing hard. But she was trying to laugh. She was denying this, to herself.

“You are kind, boy,” she said, her voice raised high, with her struggle to constrain it. “You are kind to let me be kind to you.”

He stepped back toward his chair.

“No!” She stopped him.

The hand that had been behind her hair pressed low against her throat. That word had been almost a cry. She went on, composedly:

“I am afraid it is time for you to go.”

She released her throat and held out her hand. Quincy grasped it. It was warm and masterful altogether. Then he went.

* * * * *

Julia Deering heard the door softly shut. She flung herself face-down upon the couch and began tearlessly to sob. Behind her back, her two arms went out, straining and rigid. The fists were clenched.

XIII

From that day, life was a battleground for Quincy.

The next time that he saw Julia Deering, he was swept clear of strong emotions. And this made his countenance easier to uphold. She wished no more, it seemed, than to have him docile at her feet, avid for whatever she might say. So it was needless for her to give much. And in his swept condition, it was easy for him to receive little. The kiss had been forgotten. The promise was being only tacitly lived up to.

No remorse had gripped him, after that evening. Remorse requires a consciousness of what has been, to cause it. And this, he lacked. He had kissed her. But what was in that kiss? Had it indeed been more than a promise of their fellowship? He had no way of knowing how it had seemed to Julia, and how much of her had gone out with her lips, or been there, when for a brief moment he had clasped her body.

Quincy envisaged dimly the wide variations that spirit makes in human action. In his dreams no more than such a kiss had made him drunk with joy; a fancied embrace no longer than this real one which had been, had made him faint with the need of giving. But these realities were far less sharply limned, their contents and their meanings were infinitely more complex than the willed dramas of his dreams. So Quincy felt no remorse. He was far too wildly drained by puzzlement.

The way of his soul was like a lake, wide and clear and full, at one end of which was a lock. And at times, the bolt in the lock slipped out and the waters rushed away with marvellous swiftness and there remained but a hollow basin, reeking and vaporous. So had been the week after that night. He had seen her again. But she had seemed content with his empty self. It did not occur to Quincy that this might have been, because she also had been swept of her fullness.

And then, gradually, came a healing. There had been no other sequel. The Professor had returned. He had not dared speculate upon the meeting him and facing him. But when, one day, the great man stopped him on the Campus, all of the torture he had imagined for this moment seemed strangely fanciful. He talked with him, calmly, and mentioned the dinner with his wife, and smiled at an apt remark and responded with another. Beyond, behind, he glimpsed in his brain another Quincy, spotted with red, writhing in his quandary. But this was upon the plane of his imagined tortures, a remote plane. He went away, wondering if he was a hypocrite, questioning which Quincy was the false one, hating his adaptability with life. For in his thoughts, a situation half so hard would have made his head whirl, and his heart bleed and his breath smother. Yet here he was, coolly at his lessons, chatting, digesting normally! He grew to be a wonder to himself greater than Julia was, or the Professor.

And all of the remainder of the year, there was no sequel. His calm was the calm of a great battle. But since Quincy had accepted the traditional idea of conflict, he did not know how deeply he was fighting. Yet he who has fought knows well that there is no calm so vast and so profound as the calm of conflict. Above it, the clouds may writhe and the air clash with thunder. Before it, the soul may quake and after it, the heart may bleed. But in the conflict, there is no energy at leisure to make a storm within. All of man’s power to stir has been projected outward. Within, there can be only peace. And then, little by little, as the struggle flags, the mind begins to move--the mind which is the herald of the soul. And as the inner forces put about and return homeward, they bring the turmoil and the stirring with them. And the mind catches these. And the mind speaks of bleeding or of winning, of dying or of living. And this is the consciousness of conflict--when the conflict flags.

So came it, that at that time which his jejune imaginings had pictured as unbearably upsetting, Quincy moved quietly about. And where he had dreamed of a decision in an open lists, behold! in the glamor, there was only the announcement of what had been done in secret from himself.

Julia allowed him to be alone. She demanded nothing. He saw her scarce more often than before. And when they were together, he found her reserved and smiling, with a deep suggestion of confidence and seriousness. All this helped him to a decision. And his decision was: that a great responsibility had come to him. His task must be to add Julia to her husband’s conscious treasures--to his ideals. In all ways, he must help herself to give herself to him. For he was sure that it was his failure to go out toward her, and hers to go out toward him--no more--which caused this state of famine. He did not seek a word for his emotion toward Julia. He admired her intensely; and she was a woman. That sufficed. As a woman, she did not see her husband as fully as did he. And her husband had limitations--in his capacity for living. But fortunately, he was there--he, Quincy, with his mission. He thanked God for it.

One night, after long pondering upon his ideal and strong bond with Julia, a strange lust devoured Quincy. In the hands of it he went and spent several hours with a woman whom he had met, liked, but not dreamed before of visiting. The adventure was an empty, dismal failure. And Quincy found more joy in telling Julia about it, than he had felt all of those set, uncomfortable hours.

Julia listened with her old, deep smile.

“You’re not the sort to do things like that,” she said.

And Quincy agreed. He was hungry no more--until the lust next possessed him.

Three times, that spring, he went forth that way, joyless, hopeless, brutal all at once after a roseate revery about his friend. And each time, he returned, smiling bitterly at his folly, cured of his possession, yet filled with an acrid will for something which that visit, somehow, had not come near supplying. But after the first occasion, he spoke no more of such things, to Julia. A shame had caught him, which he had not felt at first. There seemed less innocence, now, in talking to her, than there had been. He was beginning--a part of him--to understand.

Then, also, there were other storms,--sudden lusts of another stamp that swung him elsewhere away for satisfaction. At such times, he seemed a fool himself, and his task a mockery.

“Take her for what she is,” he cried then. “You’ve spun her all over with your ideals. These blind you to her and keep you off from her. What has she to do with the greatness of her husband’s brain? That is one thing. If he, the man, is so sated that he doesn’t need her, the woman--well--” and he would sit there, late at night, in his chair, and strip her lusciously of these ideals he had spun about her; strip her with trembling hands as if it had been her clothes that fell away. And he would strip also himself of his ideals and his aspirations. Until, there they two would stand--naked and shivering, needful of each other’s bodies to be warm.

But Quincy had not abandoned his brisk daily runs. He learned that when he missed his exercise, these lusts were best able to overwhelm him. So he sought his woods and the throb of his ridging muscles as a storm-threatened ship seeks harbor.

One day, they walked together. It seemed to Quincy as if he had never been less near to the meaning of the swaying woodland. All of him was shut to it. And most of him was shut as well to her. He did not know, of course, that here his customary tension against her had given him an outward signal. For this same effort to shut out her, although it might pass unnoticed in his room, had brought as its effect to shut out nature. In her wan smile, he felt however, that she knew something of which he was not aware.

It was a sterile hour that stung. But after she had left him and he was home, the memory of it seemed to blossom forth into a thing of a rare beauty and a lingering perfume, so that he soon forgot that it had been a sterile hour. If his own walks in the woods had been wild-flowers, this walk had been a rose. But the rose was as yet a small, tight bud. The thorns had grown more quickly.

* * * * *

And now, without clash of decision, or glamor of sequel, the summer holidays were near.

He sat in his room, one night. It had been a sultry day. All of the cloying afternoon, he had lain on his windowseat and given himself to reveries so nebulous that the humid air about seemed thicker to him. Below his window a forever changing crowd of boys laughed and gamboled and played at simple games. The music of their mingled feet and voices came up from underneath and seemed to shove him farther from them. He had neglected his lessons. So now he sat at his desk with an electric lamp beside him. The windows were wide open. The night breathed heavily, as if it were unwell. Then it began to rain and thunder.

At first, the water fell in clouds, drenching his window cushions. He spread a mackintosh to cover them. He did not wish to shut out the storm. He felt that he must choke without the fresh, panting vigor of the rain. Here was something elemental, simple, clear. Although he did not understand, he yearned for this, he with his mist-clogged soul, as a parched throat yearns for water. And then the downfall subsided partly and the lightning drew near. Flash after flash submerged the glow of his electric lamp. The thunder shot about him like a whirling battery in the air.

It came to Quincy that with the bolts so thick and near, it was dangerous to sit beside his lamp. He was impelled to shut his window, put out the threatened light and luxuriate in the storm from the safe haven of his bed. And then, a stronger impulse stopped him.

“_I want to test God!_” he said, placing his hand about the supple steel of the student’s lamp.

Doubtless the danger was not great. But with his challenge he had heightened it. He sat thrilled, expectant, ready to be struck. And with the fierceness of his imagining and his fancied gauntlet flung to fate, it was a brave thing he did.

As the last flash had bared the sky, careening with its black clouds above his window, so his test came to illumine the cluttered mystery of his soul. He did not know if he was guilty, if he was weak, if he was wrong. Let the lightning tell!

In the breathless pauses of the storm, he heard his heart leaping against his throat. He felt the weight of his body vibrant in the atmosphere. And so he stayed--awaiting his doom, if it cared to meet him, purified by this arbitrary danger and the dread contact it afforded with the illimitable, groaning heavens. It was a game; and in it, he for the nonce, seemed the opponent of an infinitude.

The fires swept past him. And he remained unscathed. He felt this and smiled at his recklessness. For even if there had been no danger, he had created one and braved it. Now, in the lull, his reveries grew less inchoate, his sense of fear and danger crystallized and fixed upon a less fancied, sweeping thing. He began to think of Julia.

He realized that he had done nothing; and solved nothing.

He realized that he loved her--as a woman.

The thought that at his age, he had earned this eternal, mystic guerdon--love--went through him like the bolt he had invited. And then, subtly, sweetly almost, came the bolt’s aftermath: like the crumbled, gutted charring of a tree that has sung high its song of death as the storm embraced it. And that aftermath for him was all that seemed left of his proud structure of ideals:--Professor Deering, a ruined tree with its leaves piteously seared!

Before this menace of fire, Quincy at last jumped from his seat, which the storm had not made him quit. He paced his room, to and fro, delirious with this new birth, hands tremulously open, and head bowed. It could not be! It must not be! He would save his ideals; he would not be a Judas to his Christ. She who stood burning now, in the corner of his brain, must be cast out like a brand, ere her fearful conflagration caught.

He went to bed; and still the flame of her danced and still the leaves of his tree trembled piteously and fell away. Here he felt conflict; here he felt tempest. For the battle was over.

All of the night, he lay wakeful and rocked in the fever of decision which had been now so glamorously announced to him,--and so treacherously made without him, since in truth, within him.

He awoke aching and broken and inflamed. His serenity was gone. The mask, in which he had careered all of these months so featly and so gracefully through life, was burned away. He stumbled now against the meanest barrier. The least of his duties reared itself into a crucifix. He suffered. And he struggled. Even so, struggles the beast after the trap has inexorably set.

In his pain, he ran about seeking solace. Yet, wherever he turned, he rejected help. He was afraid of Julia. In fact, she seemed scarcely at all in his mind. It was an effort to think of her. He had to force his brain to grasp the fact of her reality; and a concrete vision of what and how she was, became impossible. In his dreams, there was a looming, aching mass of agony which menaced him, or turned into a bath of luscious poison. This, he termed “Julia.” But it was not really she. It was an inchoate Thing--a thing untinged with the fixed meaning of a woman, a thing at most that a woman had engendered.

So, fearing her, ignoring her, hoping for balm from her, not recking of her really, he at last sought her out.

At once, before her, his storm subsided and became unreal; the swollen waves rolled languorously without aim or meaning.

Even now, he scarcely saw her--and knew her not at all. The time of consciousness was passed.

But it was sweet still, to be before her--helpless, mute,--while her smile glanced on him and her little, intimate movements,--the touch of her hand on her hair or the quiver of her eyelid,--cut through him like steel and played upon him like soft fingers upon a harp.

In this way, pent-up, giving nothing out, came June.

Quincy’s life rushed into summer, as a swift stream falls over a smooth precipice....

XIV

The first agile months left him a vision of her. He believed it was herself. He remained motionless and the warm days glided over him. But this they left. And since the vision, too, was soft and warm and murmurous and madding, it seemed indeed a part of themselves that the first agile months had left.

He could see her now; and fix his yearnings upon her; and recognize in the void a place where she was not. He could hear her. He could feel her. It mattered little that, as ever, he could not understand her.

A slender, vibrant form she was, standing alone upon his consciousness, as the strip of ocean stands upon the beach. Beyond the horizon, it wanders infinitely. This was his sense of her. She had eyes that felt rather than saw; and fingers that played rather than touched; and the sharp, firm lines of her body bounded him, rather than herself.

There was nothing after all, to this time, save the vision. Nature was not. Family was not. And then came the note.

It was like the dawn--a haze of disparted color heralding the sun, formless, beingless save in this, that it was drenched in the sun’s coming. And then, from beneath the clouds of blue and green and orange, a spur of fire. This is without color. But it has all that the dawn lacked, for it has form and being. It is not the dawn; it is the sun. And before its flash of flame, the deep mists of radiance fade away--orange to red and red to green and blue to the low sky. Meantime, the sun has mounted.

In this way came the note. It read:

_Dear kind boy_:

I am in New York at the Hotel, you see. In a week, I must join Lawrence in Maine. But I got weary of the little house and closed it behind me. I don’t know what I hoped to find in the burning city. But will you ride one hour to spend another hour with me?

JULIA DEERING.

He went.

The city burned indeed. But as he traversed it--slowly to preserve his neatness--he knew that he was proof against such fire. As he approached the hotel, his thoughts veered altogether backward. His thoughts were a feeble countercurrent to the great part of him that propelled so swiftly forward as to encumber his feet and place a straining awkwardness upon his effort to go slowly. Thought of what lay before him was altogether wanting. He was thinking of what he had said to his mother. He had lied to her. All of his life he could recall no lie to teach him how to utter this one. Yet he had lied glibly--and with success. He was almost proud of this--that little part of him which could pay heed, at such a moment, to any past. He had spoken of a college friend in town for a few days--one his mother knew nothing of.

“You will be back to-night?” she had said.

And then, strangely, so callous did this one falsehood seem to have made him, that he had answered: “I can’t be sure. Better not expect me.”

Why this gratuitous blow to his mother’s faith? He knew he would be back. What could keep him in New York? Surely, not a summer “show”? Only his desire to fend off his mother, a perverse consequence of lying to her, could explain his answer. Well: that was settled. A falsehood did not wait long ere it sowed its poison seed.

But now, he found his heart beating hard and painfully against his throat. It knew, before his eyes, that the hotel was there!

A dark, cool lobby, after the street’s glare--a monster with many eyes, that he must pass. It was filled with moving, mumbling creatures--each one an eye. And an eye upon a pivot that touched him and soiled him and then brushed on. It seemed to stir nervously at his intrusion, to demand his secret as indemnity for its disturbance. It was cynical and real. It must be warded off without a contact. For a contact would leave him spotted. An elevator hurled him up, from its vaporous presence.

The hall, also, lived. The soft carpet held back his feet perversely. The dark doors set in the bright grey walls marked a mocking rhythm to his interminable progress. Each turn in the passage was a mute thrust against his carefully reckoned gait. The silence of two chambermaids who had been chatting was a badge on him, and the thud of his feet also was a comment. Then, the door opened before he had to knock.

She did not smile--any more than had the vision. Such visions are serious. So was she, now, in reality. Her hand meant nothing. She took this hat. And her voice caressed him with all the firmness and mastery of her hand, that last evening of the kiss.

“You were kind to come. Take your coat off. Look--I have a cool drink ready for you. You like orange, don’t you?”

He sat at a little table, near the window, and sipped the beverage. Opposite, was she. Heavy blinds warded away the heat and the sharp clamor of the city. The room was cool and shaded. Julia sat watching him. She wore a housegown of pongee--the color of parched violets. Her hair stood in coils over her ears.

“I am not warm,” she said. “I have stayed in, during the heat.”

His eyes had questioned if she, too, was thirsty.

“It is deliciously comfortable here.”

Her head tossingly measured the room. Quincy did not see it. But he felt its cool, fresh walls and the white wood and the cane furniture. It was a sitting room. Two heavy doors in a dark varnish gave accent to its breezy tidiness.

She chatted gaily. Allusions to his abstention from her while he was still at college shafted to him and inflamed him. But she laughed at his excuses.

“I am not exacting,” she declared.

And then, once more, she was serious. It had been so long, she was not sure now, that she still knew him. What, all this time, had happened to him? His answers showed his discomfort. Julia arose and stood over him.

“What is wrong?” she said. Her hand went to his brow. “Why is that ruffled?” And then, with the other hand beneath his chin, she turned his head upward.

A veil went over Quincy’s eyes.

“Is it my turn,” she spoke softly, “to be kind to you?”

And in reply, he wrenched his head from her grasp and bent it so low that she could not see his face. He felt her hands lifting his shoulders. And in this way, he came to his feet.

“Big boy, why do you hang your head?”

He raised it. In a flash, she lay in his arms. But he did not touch her.

“I want you,” he cried and then was silent.

Julia stepped away from him. A joy was in her face that he could not mistake.

And then, she took his hand. And she seated herself. And somehow, Quincy was at her feet with his head upon her lap. This seemed exquisitely right. Yet, though he thrilled with joy and the near warmth of her body intoxicated him, he sobbed. She held his head and his shoulders as if he needed sustenance until this ecstasy of relief was over. And so he remained, until his eyes were dry and his heart spoke dear within him, like a bell.

* * * * *

She held him until the morrow. She nursed him and cherished him as if he had been sick. She hid him while the unknowing waiter brought food into the sitting-room. And then, laughing with her joke, she shut out the world once more, which had been permitted to intrude with the staid dress and visage of the lackey, and served him herself.

Avid for sleep, the big boy slumbered in her arms all of the night--a sleep broken with jewel-like gleams of consciousness wherein, waking from dreamless rest to a dream-like reality, he could clasp his fantasy and breathe her breath and feel the murmurous rhythm of her body against his and, twining his fingers through her vagrant hair, slumber afresh.

When she let him go, she took his hand and held it under her heart.

“Will your mother have worried at your absence?” She felt the worry, as if she had been the mother she had never met.

“Why, no!” he cried. “That’s funny. I told her I should not be back!”

But there was no need of fearing lest Julia misunderstand. For a brief moment, perhaps, the doubt pricked her about the boy’s sincerity. And then, she saw. Women understand these mystic intuitions, for women reap the harvest of them. She was elated at the chance impulse that made Quincy warn his mother, lest her worrying bring a flaw to their true holiday.

And then, she sent him back.

XV

One week before its opening, Quincy returned to college.

It was a brisk and cloudless September day. But already, though work had not yet begun and behind him were months of ostensible recreation, his angular gait showed that the boy was tired. Indeed, what was directly past had been a hostile, clumsy way for him. With an intensity that made his other struggles pale, the conflict in him had been renewed. And there among his family, he had lived on, bearing his secret and constrained to keep it from them. It had not seemed particularly hard for him. It was natural to be silent and secretive and to furrow himself with stubborn questionings. But the heat of it had over-wearied him, although he knew so little of it.

He was aware that none of the eager spring of a new year was in his body as he marched up the main street of the college town. He was aware that he was apathetic and dull of eye. But the full force of what had caused this, he had not gauged. As he looked back upon the element of his family, it seemed to him, even, that it had helped. It had supplied the tang of sweet retribution in this fact, that he, so generally of no account, nourished a life within him more marvelous than anything his family had dreamed. As ever, Adelaide sought him and groped for him and failed. As ever Quincy felt the need of what she had to give yet ignored the conduit to her. For Adelaide knew there was something. She saw him bowed down with a new suffering and dazed with some still more perilous splendor. But her incessant efforts to share and help merely heightened his distress. With his mother, it was different. Sarah saw nothing, understood nothing. And now, when she lectured him upon his need of growing up and of preparing for responsibilities which, luckily, he did not as yet possess, it was delicious for him to smile and know and in silence suffer her misapprehension. For now, at last, he seemed to have a proof which he had always craved--of her injustice. What had hurt before was the insidious fear that she was right. Now, in his great secret, did he not know her wrong? So, the mixed element of family had not seemed unbearable. For Quincy could not know that his perverse delight in watching his mother, by her words, tear down her hold in him was far more ruinous to his composure than the pain of failure to help Adelaide build up hers. By permitting his mother to act counter to her primal place in his emotions, he was merely tangling and maiming them. This rational proof of her disharmony could distress him. But it could not touch her hold. It could serve merely to make it a less bearable, but not less real thing.

Here then, was college, once more--the callous theater in which he would enact his scene.

There had been no word or letter between him and Julia. He was glad of this. It made his march across the Campus toward the Professor’s office a less fearful effort. It justified the conviction which he willed, that she had loosed her hold on him, bade him follow his conscience. But was he following his conscience?

He stood before the silent, yellow door of the office. He straightened visibly as if he had meant to measure himself against it--against what it signified. What was he following? What was it, while he pondered, that had driven him here; and now--had driven his list in signal against the yellow door?

Silence, again. And in this lack of substance in response, something fell away from him. It was as if he had leaned all his soul against an answer and found only emptiness. He was glad. He would go away. He would never come back. He feared lest perhaps the Professor should be there. He tried to retreat. And the door opened. There he was--big and undiminished, smiling invulnerably at him. His outstretched hand drew Quincy back.

“Will you wait--just five minutes? I am busy with another man.”

There was no way of escape. Quincy sat down on the step and waited. His mind was empty. He felt the grey stone stair about him. He saw a break in the plastered ceiling. He put his fingers against his eyes and asked how it was that what these round things saw, he also seemed to see. He tried to rehearse the ordeal that impended--to ascertain what it was to be. He got no farther than: “How do you do, Mr. Deering?” He repeated this, over and over and over. It became a drone and a sing-song and a mockery.... And then, he was actually within--alone with him. And he had forgotten to say the one thing he had rehearsed: “How do you do, Mr. Deering?”

The Professor looked at him searchingly, made him sit down at the big desk, stood, himself, between him and the window, his generous hands clasped behind his back.

“Well, Mr. Burt--what brings you here?” A pause. “You are in trouble?”

“Yes, Mr. Deering.”

The big man’s face softened. He moved away beneath a high rack of books, in order that the boy should not need to stare into the light.

“Would you rather have me sit down, also?”

Quincy felt his consideration. “No,” he said.

“Very well, then--” The Professor’s face was gently serious, as if he could not brook the weakness of a delay in starting.

“Professor Deering--Professor Deering--” But Quincy could not go on. He arose to his feet. That helped. But what he said amazed him as deeply as the other. “Professor Deering--tell me about you and your wife.”

Mr. Deering took the remark without a tremor. His face darkened and his brow brooded. His clasped hands fell forward to his side. He did not mistake the nature of the boy.

“You have a right to know?” he asked, softly.

“I love her, Professor Deering.”

They stood, not far apart, facing each other, firmly. And in the pause, neither of them breathed. It seemed to Quincy at that moment impossible that all this should be true. He watched the scene with a fiendish interest, as if waiting for an inevitable ruin.

The Professor swallowed hard. And then, he spoke.

“You love her. So do I. That gives you a right to ask what you have asked. Sit down.”

He gestured the boy back into his seat.

“We are in strangely similar positions, Mr. Burt. We both love her. Neither of us has her. There is no more to say.”

“Neither of us--?”

“Yes. She is my wife; but she is not mine. At first, of course, I believed she was. But she withdrew.”

“She accuses you of withdrawing, Mr. Deering!” The boy cried this out, as if in pain.

The other bit his lip, savagely. “Then you have heard both sides, Mr. Burt? What more can you demand?”

And again, there was a pause.

“Did you come here,” the big man’s voice was low and vibrant with his question, “did you come here to judge me?”

Quincy hid his face in his hands. “To judge you? To judge you? Good God! I came here to ask you to judge me!”

A jet of understanding shivered through the man. Quincy was not looking. And in that moment, his face broke. He righted himself, mastered himself and strode toward the boy. He wrenched his hands from his face.

“Look up!” he cried.

And Quincy met his clear, deep brown eyes--met them unflinchingly, his head strained up to do so, his body still huddled in his chair, his wrists hotly clenched in the hands of the Professor.

The Professor dropped his hold.

“We cannot judge each other, Quincy. That would be as unfair, one way as the other. I do not understand. But I have stopped questioning. We can spare one another that. And without tangling one another further, we can go on, solving our lives.”

He stopped; and stepping back, surveyed the boy. “You will not misunderstand the spirit in which I have received you. Do not turn your back on anything--on me, for instance, or on her. Be a man. Now go.”

He spoke with a gigantic effort. And now, he held out his hand.

Quincy looked at it. He leaned back rigidly against the easy path of taking it.

“Professor,” he said, “I cannot take your hand.”

The hand dropped back to the Professor’s side. A flash of anger went before a cloud of pain. Both of these Quincy saw on his face. And then, after a silence, Mr. Deering spoke:

“Mr. Burt,” he said, “your impulse in being unwilling to take my hand, since you were willing to come to me--I confess--I cannot understand it. It is due either to weakness or to a worse thing. You have disappointed me,--for the first time.... Think it over. And come back to me, when you can take my hand.” He walked toward the door, and, flinging it open--: “Good-bye,” he said.

So Quincy went away.

* * * * *

Such were the auspices of junior year.

Everything seemed gone which he had so bravely builded up. Eighteen years it had taken him to gain a vantage point in life, to breathe life’s air without pain and meet life’s onslaught with a kind of joy. And then, after one brief excursion, everything had collapsed, everything had died; and only he remained--he, the eternal constant, but bruised and shrunken and stripped of even the glimmer of understanding. What had been wrong with him? What false fire had this been, making his warmth and his vision?

Quincy trudged through the campus, bound for his room, as a wounded beast seeks his lair. Several of his mates passed him. He was forced to stop and shake their hands and meet their perfunctory questions as to his summer. And all of them felt the coldness of this fellow, Burt; and Quincy knew that all of them felt this. So he avoided stopping when he could. And he shut the door of his room behind him--it was as if to blot out the serene self-satisfaction of the college buildings under whose stony eyes he had had to pass. And he rejoiced at the emptiness of his room. And so, he sank into a chair and began feeling for his wound.

But it was utterly hopeless.

The room had not yet been placed in order. A trunk stood on the floor; a carpet was rolled away in the corner; chiffonière and book-box and divan huddled together, giving an air of disarray. He could not find his wound, in such a clutter. He knew merely that its pain submerged him, flooded its position, made him feel that all of him was drenched with blood. Vacantly, like this, he sat for an hour. And then, an idea drew him from the room.

He boarded a car. And now, he was in the open; hatless, panting, seeking nature as a solace. The gentle woods flared away in their autumnal dress. The wind tarried in the branches, shaking the red leaves downward with the fresh force of its news. Quincy marched on, over the full-blown grass. A copse of locust trilling before him, a harsh space where malignant-colored sumachs mingled with the thickspread blackberry briars that caught and stung him--and then, he reached a grove of fir. Here, he sat down. The ground was moist and green. And a great spruce spread out its balmful verdure. Beyond lay the parched woods. But he was free and cut off from them. Here, he should be able to fix his wound.

From the clouds of feeling that swirled up in him, the clear-cut figure of Julia Deering came forth. He resented her. There was no love in his beholding her. This hurt. For it was an emptiness that ached. And then, a strange sensation filtered through. Why did he resent her? Despise her almost? He had hurt her; that was why. He had been unfair to her; that was why. He had betrayed her and she lay silent in his mind throughout, unstirring, unprotesting. This was the unforgivable thing. This was why. How could he love a creature himself had maimed?

For a brief moment, Quincy veered upon the truth. Had he but dared to alight there, to go no farther, to drive his standard and hold firm! Quincy began to see how weak and straddling it had been to go to him, to remain silent toward her; began to see what a fund of cowardly uncertainty his virtue hid, that prompted him to feel a guilt toward him, instead of a right for her; began to see that in his action lay a hedging, a shallowness of feeling, a failure to build up his own morale and his own measure, as a force which was life-saving should! He had maimed everything. He had not stood by him, not stood by her. From each, he had been willing to receive; and his response in each case had been a blow in the back, once that back was turned. Oh! there was health in this hatred, this detestation of himself which gripped him now like a storm! It was torture. But from such torture he could arise and still create. All that he needed was not to escape the storm; to invite, rather, the heart of it; to remain drowned in it, till it had swept him clean.

But though he had veered so nigh, he was too unstable not to fly on and past. The vision of the truth died out behind him in the spray-dashed horizon. Quincy began to defend himself, to rationalize, to seek a way of self-forgiveness. And of course, that which he sought, he found. He did not know what Julia had meant. He had been mad with Julia; and his madness was over, as madness should be. Perhaps, she also had been mad and her madness, also, had disappeared. His scruple, driving him to Professor Deering, was a clean and brave one. He had a conscience. What could a conscience be, but good and strong? Who ever had dared suggest that conscience was a coward and a traitor? Professor Deering simply had not understood. He would not lose him, he would make him understand. And the great man, regretting his injustice, would cry him welcome and crave his pardon. As to Julia--he felt with strong effort, he might still be able to look upon her as a friend. His infatuation was gone. But so might go, also, his new repulsion.

Many times, Quincy had alighted in this false haven. He should have known its meretriciousness. He should have known that it would as surely fail him as it had failed before. So now, a moment after, the smooth way receded, the storm swept back and he was no better off than he had been. But far beyond the passed horizon, the shore of truth had died away. Ahead might be illimitable seas, lashed with his fury. But the truth was gone.

And so, unsuccored even by this last resort, Quincy abandoned his fir grove and went back, unheeding, through the magnificence of autumn.

* * * * *

College resumed its mechanical paces; Quincy went through them poorly. His marks fell to dangerously near the point of failing. But he sustained them, barely, as he sustained the business of taking food and sleep. Garsted was gone. He had graduated and Quincy rejoiced in his absence. It would have been impossible to talk with him. It would have been more difficult with him about, to remain hedged in his solitude, as he desired.

And so, through the fall, his feelings fought each other. There was no giving out. The conflict was within, mute, targetless, internecine. At times, his repulsion for Julia paled before mad lapses into passion. These turned upon him, smote him and sent him shuddering back into repulsion. There had been no word of her, no glimpse of her. He knew with clearness, only that this was his own doing. The Professor he saw twice weekly, in his class. But he was so easily aloof on his high platform, fronting a score of boys, that this habitual sight was nothing.

There had been months of his silence.

And then, one day--without preamble--Quincy went out to see Julia Deering. It was not his old passion; nor his still older love. It was a need--all of his energies centered upon seeing her--no more. He rang the bell. And while the maid left him waiting in the hall, he stood consumed by his fears of disgrace and by a miserable effort to hold up his head. The maid returned with word that she was out. He walked away, every fiber of him straining against the direction of his walking, reiterant that she was there and that, with a little force, he might have seen her. Next day, he returned. And upon his fourth attempt, the maid with a bland smile of sympathy showed him into the little over-decorated room.

And now, she stepped within. Deliberately, her back toward him, she shut the door. Then, she faced about.

“I decided after all,” she said, “to let you see me. The first time you came I was here. The other two times, I was really out. How are you?”

He did not answer, so full he was of looking at her. She seemed older. The drawn skin below her eyes was flushed and feverish. Her eyes were immeasurably deep and soft--as if some psychic lance had pierced them. Her body was strained forward. It seemed to tremble as does a delicate blade of steel when it resounds. Surely, this was an ineffably lovely thing that he had lost! For he had lost her. Her lips showed that, in their quivering strength; ere she had spoken. And her hands showed that, in their calm mastery,--and the backward jerk of her shoulders and the cold fullness of her hair. This was no lover; this was a creature without his ken, whom he had wounded. For every vibrance of her voice and form seemed a response, not to his need, not to his love, not even to his weakness, but to his hurt.

He stood there, forgetful of himself. And all of the words that were spoken came from her.

“I thought,” she said, “after your so plainly-speaking silence, that you would understand, without inflicting this upon us both.”

Then, she smiled. There was no rancor. But she could not keep her hurt from speaking.

“Dear, poor, Quincy,” she went on, almost as if he had been the messenger of the dead boy, her lover, “don’t you see, that after what you have done, after what you have failed to do, the one thing left that will not be altogether horrible, is to have an end? There are times in life, boy, when an end is the one salvation.” She smiled again, as if at her idea. “Of course, the final one of these times is death. But we have had no difficulty, have we, to put an end to this--without that?”

Quincy shuddered. He wished to ask her if she loved him, had ever loved him. But he could say nothing. She went on:

“I idealized you, Quincy. I do not regret it. As long as I dared hope--as long, that is, as I could keep from seeing you as you really are, I was so happy! I needed you. You were kind--for a little while. And then, you, also, could not bear my kindness. So it was, was it not? That was the reason why you stayed away? Well--there are women like me, whose kindness is unbearable. I often think--it is a little game of mine that brings me solace--that men who yearn have a better chance. The poet can create a universe to serve. This is wide enough to stem his aching. But a woman--all she can have is a mate and a child, to cover up her wound. Her intensity is equal to the poet’s. I am sure of that. But what she has is not equal to what he has. That is unfair, is it not?”

Quincy was hushed before the spectacle of his loss. Why could he not still throw himself at her feet? Did his unworthiness at length shame him from even hoping? How rich and full was this living beauty before the bloodless, craven things in his mind--ideals, conscience, aspirations--for which he had cast her out!

Again, respecting his silence, she spoke to him:

“There is one thing, Quincy, I still hope for. One thing I am still so humble as to ask of you. You remember what I once said to you:--that what I needed was the feeling that I would live on, in some way, in your own life. Quincy dear, do not let that part of me that stays in you turn bitter! Keep it pure, dear boy. Let it make you happy, once in a while. Cherish it! Oh, I beg this of you!” She stopped and her hands clenched before her.

“I ask this, not selfishly. I know you so well! If you can keep this part of me happy and clean within you, it may save you some day. I know that--and I fear, I fear what may come, if you do not.”

Now tears were there, glistening down her cheeks.

She seemed to be waiting for his promise--waiting for him to give her the hope she had been humble enough to ask. But Quincy stood there silent; full of, and measuring, his loss. And as her glance sought out his eyes, it came back from them, unrefreshed and undiminished.

Slowly, she closed her eyes as if thereby shutting in the last effort of her soul to venture forth.

And then, with a faint tremble, she turned away.

“Good-bye,” she said softly, and so left the room.

XVI

The rest of the year was a shadow under which he walked.

He abandoned himself completely. He let his life slip utterly from his hands. It was as if it had been a thing so strange and so repugnant, that it was useless, even as it was loathsome, to keep it with him. So he allowed himself, without effort or regret, to slip away.

He did not go back to the Deering house, nor did he ever again shake Professor Deering’s hand. These were things that had gone from him with his dreams. He did his work. He spoke more affably than before, to his comrades. He even joined them a little in their activities. But it was vacant intercourse.

The woods were redolent of bitter memories, so he avoided them. When he walked through them their rebuke prompted him to run. And when he ran, as of old, their rich suggestion held him back. So he abandoned both.

He joined the track-team in the spring. But he ran badly, now that he strained so to win his race. The students had not forgiven him. They saw him come, and when he failed to prove his worth, they dropped him without a glimmer of regret.

His dreams he turned savagely against, and against all that nurtured them, or harbored them or swung in tune with them. He gave up reading. He proved to himself that art was a mockery, and culture a delusion. He turned toward science, about which--knowing nothing of it--he could find no ancient landmark of himself to hate. He came to disapprove of college. He decided to lead a useful life and to obey his mother. He believed that at last he had found a way to gain his family’s respect and that their past evaluation of his merits had come very near the truth. But now, he was done with the clouds of fancy. He knew he had a good mind. He would set it to some concrete plow and make, at last, a concrete furrow for his life.

He told his father that he had had enough of college. He asked him, after a short vacation, to find a place for him in business--that he might enter in the fall. His father agreed, looking at him queerly, asking no question. His mother said: “Well, you lasted longer than Jonas.” Rhoda congratulated him and Adelaide seemed hurt. But none of these typical reactions worried Quincy. He had known what to expect.

He decided that he must cultivate his brother, Marsden. He sensed the cripple’s flinty empiricism, and this seemed to him the proper weapon to beat away, once and for all time, the residue of dream that clogged his life.

And so, the year came to an end.

He had turned away his face from it--from all that it contained--from Julia. He thought that by so doing, he was turning his face forward.