As he walked swiftly along the country road that led to the lake, the feel of the thick fine dust through the thin soles of his canvas shoes gave him an aching sense of pleasure. The balls of his stockingless feet, his toes, seemed to have acquired a new sensitiveness that morning. They pressed the earth hungrily as though to imprint on it a palpable and lasting caress.
His eyes, dark-ringed after a sleepless night, moved constantly, as though to drink in all possible beauty from the dew-drenched burnished land. They swept over a field of ripe corn, from which came a dry, sweet whisper as though all the tiny imprisoned kernels sang together. They swept hungrily over a swarthy stubble field, from which a great flock of crows rose into the blueness of the sky. They espied, bluer than the sky, the clump of chicory by the roadside. Nothing could escape them. Not the spider's web, red as copper in the red sunrise. Not the sudden sparkle of dew on a tilting leaf. Not the slender imprint of a bird's foot on the dust before him.
He loved it so, and he was going to leave it. So often had he traversed this road, afoot and on his bicycle, and now this was to be the last time!
He could endure his life no longer. He had thought it all out through the long night, reviewed its nineteen years of blundering, cowardice, and terrors, and he had reached the certainty that he could endure it no longer. If he had had one friend—one person who could have understood, and pitied his forlornness! There was Alayne, but she was inaccessible because of the presence of Eden. And, even if he could have gone to her and poured out his miserable heart, it would not have sufficed, for there was the family, a solid hostile wall, impervious
