The funny excited anticipation when he first saw the sign in the subway: Out to Mass. Avenue and the College Yard; then the intonations of arguing voices, hands knocking the ashes out of pipes, card catalogues in the library, the dazzle of unimagined horizons with phrases of all the philosophers going by like the transparencies in a political parade. His aunt in a coffin, her grey face brittle under glass like the imitation flowers in showcases in Peabody. His father and mother bustling about. During the service he had run away and locked himself in the bathroom and cried like when he had been in a temper when he was very little. And now here I am, and what am I going to do to live without dreams? Tomorrow and tomorrow ... how silly that's Shakespeare. He was walking down a straight deserted street through Cambridgeport. A few trees cut the cold glint of light against windows and scrawled shadows over the uneven snowpiles along the gutters. He walked fast, staring at the arclights that were violet in the center and gave off green and orange rays through the thin mist. At a corner in front of a red A. P. store a group of boys followed him with their eyes. Muckers. "O, Algy!... It's late, Algernon," they taunted him in falsetto voices as he passed. A snowball whizzed past his ear. "How in hell do they know I'm in college? Must be the smell," he muttered amusedly. A sudden tingle of curiosity went through him to know about those boys on the corner. How he'd lain awake at night thinking of muckers when he was a kid, making himself stories of fights, things with girls, adventures he'd do if he were a mucker, if he were to run away from Aunt Susan and be a mucker. He thought of himself scuttling over roofs from the cops, shots twanging hard in the zero-green night, dancing belly to belly with a painted girl in a cellar. But enough of dreams. Tomorrow I'm going to live. Busy his mind had been all the evening, urging his tired legs on to its throb, clanking out memories raspingly, the way a press turns out papers; all at once he knew why. He had to keep from thinking of Nan.