After the evening meal he sat in an easy chair upholstered with violent green plush and usually occupied at such times by his father, but donated to him in honor of his first evening of submission. He sprawled in the chair, trifling with the headlines of a newspaper and throwing them aside. A warm and not unpleasant stupor began to descend upon his thoughts and emotions and they fluttered spasmodically, like circles of drugged butterflies. He closed his eyes. His legs and arms held a heaviness which he enjoyed because he was not forced to raise it. “Will this be my end--a swinging of arms and legs during the daytime and then different shades of sleep or sensual bravado at night?” he asked himself drowsily--a well-remembered sentence that needed little consciousness. Suddenly, an emotional revolt within him tore against his physical lethargy, like lightnings from some unguessed depth of his soul, and he was astonished to find himself sitting upright in the chair. He saluted the victory joyously. “By God, I won’t give in as easily as this,” he whispered to the purple grapes on the tan wall-paper, addressing them because their ugliness was at least helplessly inert. “You’re concrete symbols, if nothing else, and you don’t stumble amidst unconquered clouds. I’ll go to the park and try to write a poem.” Agreeably amazed at the returning vestige of strength in his legs he walked to the public-park and sat down upon a bench. Ignoring the people who were strolling or romping around him he bent over his paper-pad and tugged at the smooth insolence of rhyme and meter, but the fight was an uneven one since his mind and emotions were still brittle and dazed from their day of hurried subjection. After crumbling sheets of paper for two hours he wrote: TO A SAND-PIPER One blast--a mildly frightened little host Of liquid sprites, each holding one high note, Aroused from some repentance in the throat Of this grey-yellow bird who skims the coast-- And silence. Far off I can somehow feel The drooping-winged sprites back to covert steal. The poem did not satisfy him, and in a measure he felt like a sleepwalker who was imitating gestures that had lost their meaning to him, but he dared not substitute his actual thoughts and emotions in place of the tenuous or stilted fancies which he believed were all that poetry was allowed to achieve. All that he wanted to say, and all that he did say in conversation with himself, muttered unhappily within him as he sat on the bench and strained to capture the pretty suggestions of a mystical rapture, but he was slave to the belief that poetry was a thinly aristocratic experience in which thoughts and emotions, serene, noble, and ludicrously artificial, disdained the lunges of thought and the turmoils of an actual world--pale, washed-out princes contending among themselves for trinket-devices known as rhymes and meters.