The rustle of trees had become an insignificant whisper of defeat; the songs of birds had changed to the shrill vacuities with which a monster entertained himself; the colored groups of flowers had become the pitiful remains of a violated carnival; the earth beneath his feet had altered to the stolid aloofness of a giant moron; and the sunlight had seemed to be a theatrical accident. When he had reached the city, with its orderly ranks of houses and factories and its dully precise pavements, the scene had been to him a cunning mirage made by dying people to suppress their realization of the advancing destruction. The people on the streets had held the complicated glee and perplexity of an insane slave trying to extract an imaginary importance from his bondage. He had longed to jump at their throats and silence the feverish lie that was reviling the truthful stare of his eyes and only his physical exhaustion had prevented him from doing this. Grief is a spontaneous welcome sent to the insanity that lurks within all human beings, and its invitation greets a responsive strength or a frightened weakness of imagination, according to the man or woman who receives it. And so he had plodded back to his home, carrying within him a numb confusion that was sometimes disrupted by vicious impulses, and forcing the ghost of himself into a motion which it could not understand. He had tried to answer the angry and uneasy questions of his parents with plausible lies at his own expense. Yes, he had met someone who had given him bad news and in a fit of temper he had rushed from the railroad station and deserted his valises. What was in the telegram? Oh, just a message from a friend. Where had he been for the past two days? Why, he had gone on a spree and had slept off his drunkenness at the house of a friend. Shouldn’t he be locked in an insane asylum? Yes, but life had already granted him that favor. With a glib tongue he tried to serenade the barren comedy of improbabilities to which he had returned, but he scarcely heard the words that he was uttering, and as he wrung them from the empty ghost that was within him he longed to strike his parents in the face and feed greedily upon their rage and astonishment, in an effort to convince himself that he was still substantially powerful, still able to assert his reality by injuring the people around him. With an act of this kind he could destroy the indifferent fantasy of life and change it to a tangible and active opponent. The man standing before him--his father--was merely an irritating puppet whose lack of understanding moved jerkily, governed by the hands of an ignorant dream.