--You do not know, but I have seen your parents. If I said so would you flush? would your heart rush back in panic, hide in your flesh I have touched by seeing your parents? She counted me change so soberly ... correct, correct ... ‘If I make a mistake against you I will lose by and by: if I make a mistake against me I lose now.’ The greed of justice in your mother counting me change. That time when the clerks were all busy and I in a hurry, your father came out smiling, sold me--what was it?--sausage and cheese? So simple, so condescending he was. You are the child of such parents. They have saved: they have saved in justice of greed, in justice of condescension: and of this saving of their greed and arrogance, you buy your College books, you buy your poetry books, you buy your hours here. Aren’t you ashamed? No he is not ashamed. He is right. Sausages and dollars saved are slime, are lies. You are true, Samson Brenner. You are older than your stinking parents. She filled his glass with wine. He sipped. His eyes were hot amber in an iron vat. He asked no question, he sipped. “Do you want to hear the poem?” he said. --I hear it already. “Repeat it.” He did not question her words, he did not question her wine. He took them. His head bent forward. He held his face in his hands ... soft hands. He spoke his poem through soft hands. The poem was a stiff, an alien thing: but her words she had not spoken in the glow of his face were his and came back to her, a poem. --I become myself. I become untouched. Speak on, Boy. Make me untouched!... He has young eyes--the shadows that rim them are marked by thousand years.... * * * * * The world was a sunny field and the young mother walked in it and was herself. Each thing was itself, stood clear up in the sunny field of the world. Black ant over a tuft of grass held the sun in its blackness. Grass threw sparkle of sun against a blue sky dazed with sunniness.--I too walking and carrying the sun. I am very sharply myself, like an ant, like a leaf, throwing with them the sun in a vast gold shower upward into the sky.... Leon was gone: there would be no word of any sort further between them. Fanny had a way of sitting on her porch and pinching the flesh of her bared arm. Solid! She loved her solidness--I am real! She was sunny with feeling her flesh and her soul real. --Harry is coming back. O I know! I must be ready, I must be _real_. She was real. Her thoughts, her feelings, her pain were petal and stamen and pistil of the full flower of her realness. Sitting now, different, in her little house where she had been abandoned ... above the pry and the impudent concern of those about her, above the hurt and the insult of Harry’s going ... facing the sacrament of his return--how? beaten, broken?--fully as she had faced no truth in all her life. ... With her child in arms she could pinch bravely and find real....