He was now out in the world with a vengeance, and instead of being filled with zest for life's battles, he had a desire to walk on and on, out through the gates, down the narrow streets, past his dormitory, past all the houses, Longfellow's and Lowell's and President Eliot's, past everything historical and exemplary, till he came to fields of grass into which he could fling himself and forget the doubts and dreads that were in the back of his mind, waiting for a chance to pounce upon him. But one never seemed to get beyond the historical and the exemplary; the green fields were indeed, as the old hymn expressed it, "far away."
In the world he was so desperately out in, was one person and one alone who ignored the tiresome orthodoxies that had just beaten him. In a few more days Sophie's house, his haven, would be closed, and Sophie would have departed. His passion for oblivion transmogrified itself into a passion for Sophie's presence, Sophie's coolness and heretical naturalness and strange, soothing fragrance, her tacit, all-enveloping comprehension. He swung on his heel and set out for town,—wondering, in the subway, if he still looked like a student.
Graduation from youth to manhood under Sophie's tutelage was so much more significant than academic graduation. He was tired of thinking, tired of talking and reading; he wanted to listen and listen and listen to Sophie's unexpected views, her unexpected sentences, long, crisp, and curly, like the smoke that
