Yet I was neither depraved nor very different from the other youths of Wappinger Falls, who not only took their pleasures where they found them, but often more forcibly than persuasively. I did not analyze it fully or clearly, but I was at least to some extent aware of the essentially loveless atmosphere around me. The rigid convention of late marriages bred an exaggerated respect for chastity which had two sides: sisters’ and daughters’ honor was sternly avenged with no protest from society, and undiscovered seduction produced that much more gratification. But both retribution and venery were somewhat mechanical; they were the expected rather than the inescapable passions. Revivalists—and we country people had a vast fondness for those itinerants who came periodically to castigate us for our sins—denounced our laxity and pointed to the virtues of our grandparents and greatgrandparents. We accepted their advice with such modifications as suited us, which was not at all what they intended. And this was how I took my mother’s admonition to be my own man. What debts I owed her and my father seemed best discharged by relieving them of the burden of my keep, since I was clearly not fitting myself to reverse the balance. The notion that there was an emotional obligation on either side hardly occurred to me; I doubt if it did to them. Toward Agnes Jones I felt no debt at all. A few months after my seventeenth birthday I packed my three most cherished books in my good white cotton shirt, and having bade a most romantic goodbye to Agnes, one which would certainly have consummated her hopes had her father come upon us, I left Wappinger Falls and set out for New York. _2._ _OF DECISIONS, MINIBILES, AND TINUGRAPHS_ I thought I could do the walk of some eighty miles in four days, allowing time to swap work for food, supposing I found farmers or housewives agreeable to the exchange. June made it no hardship to sleep outdoors, and the old post road ran close enough to the Hudson for any bathing I might want to do. The dangers of the trip were part erf the pattern of life in the United States in 1938. I didnt particularly fear being robbed by a roving gang for I was sure organized predators would disdain so obviously unprofitable a prey, and individual thieves I felt I could take care of, but I was not anxious to be picked up as a vagrant by any of the three police forces, national, state, or local. As a freeman I was more exposed to this chance than an indent would be, with a work-card on his person and a company behind him. A freeman was fair game for the constables, state troopers, or revenuers to recruit, after a perfunctory trial, into one of the chain gangs upon whom the roads, canals and other public works were dependent.