He opened his eyes with a jerk. The room was familiar and quiet about him, the accustomed bulk of the desk opposite the bed. Out on Mt. Auburn Street voices, occasional steps. He closed his eyes again and fell asleep. IV Wenny walked alone down a long street of arclights, memories throbbing to the rhythm of his swift, nervous steps. Every instant he seemed to walk from end to end the whole street of his life. Back in his childhood it had been unaccountable and dark, overhung; where was it he had walked down a narrow alley between towering blind brick walls that trembled with a roar of hidden engines? The terror of it had been like that. Then breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses set back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps, tiny, like through the wrong end of the telescope, shepherding Noah's animals out of the cardboard ark; and the smell of the varnish scaling off toys, grain of wood grimed by the fingers, black gleam of the floor under the bay window. Then streets to go out in alone, runnings to the corner drugstore, vast, glittering, reeking with dangerous smells, to buy aspirin for Auntie. Terror of faces looking out through grated area windows. And now all that's over. I am going to live. The uneven frozen slush on the pavement crunched underfoot. And the little funny store where they had candy canes striped like barberpoles and toy trumpets; tin shiny through green and red bright paint; and the feel of rough brown paper twisted funnel-shape, cornucopias, horns of plenty, Auntie said they were. And the smell of schoolrooms and ink on his fingers, and himself walking home fast to get away from Pug Williams, who said he'd smash his dirty mug in. Fire engines and bare, proud arms of firemen loafing in the enginehouse. Muckers, bad-smelling in brown black clothes, who threw snowballs at you and wrote dirty words on the pavement, reckless, who had no aunts to scold them. And tonight I walk fast to get away from all these memories, because tomorrow I am going to live. And there had been the time he had first discovered memories, when he had held his life out at arms' length and looked at it. And the streets had been full of girls then, the tilt of heels, ankles, calves swelling under wind-yanked skirts; the hot blush and the sudden trembling heartbeat when his eyes met a girl's eyes; the girls giggling over sodas in corner drugstores. The smell of hot asphalt and oil from a steam-roller puffing and clanking in front of the house, the wonderfulness of engines and boats, whistles and the churned harbor-water as the liner left the wharf. Ballantyne read with smarting eyes after bedtime, black faces against blue sea and chattering paraquets greener than an emerald and himself brownly naked in the surf of lonely beaches. Now for all that. No more dreams, I'm going live tomorrow.