His right hand clasped his left wrist behind him. His knees and chin thrust forward. From waist to shoulder he tended back. So he walked. He walked through his life. He ached as he walked through his life. He felt himself trample. He trampled what he felt. Was it not clear? Clarity. He had lived in a pigsty. He had come forth. He was young. He would make a better way for himself in the world than the way of Silvis and Stumm. He would study, he sensed already, and was it not good that already beyond the bowing of fiddles he had won the trenchant accent of Reason--Spencer, Darwin, Huxley? He yearned towards the ecstacy of their release from mist and frowziness ... from beer and Puccini. A crumble of old churches falling in dust, drenching the air with dust. He had hands to tear down. He partook of the ecstacy of the release that lay in clear books, clear eyes, hands tearing down.... His father went to church. He saw again the great stomach and the little eyes and the twist of the wreathing mouth ... the heft of fat red hands he felt ... they were sodden in hair ... beating against him, beating the children of his father’s house. Karl’s arm swung at his side, his chin no longer thrust. He felt now his mother’s voice: it lay like a warm purple scarf against the chill of his thoughts; his mother had a red, sweet mouth shut upon her mystery; she moved beyond the shoulder of the town like a sunset bleeding. Karl’s hand clasped a wrist once more beyond his back.... The woman whom he had seen in the street and who haunted him ... he struggling against her. “Think! Think! Conquer yourself!” He walked now heavy and stiff. “Very well. What is she?” he fought. He turned upon this woman with clamped breasts ... this myth ... this nonsense. Why was she like green fields? Why was his mind like lead? Married ... a stranger! Oh, she was suffering, he knew. --Once I spoke to her; but my lips trembled. “No, I am married,” came her pleading whisper. But her hand moved toward him.... A complacent clod of a little man. But husband. Married. A stranger.... Why was his mind a forest of hot trees when he needed a path? A pavement. Hard, clear, cool, like here where his feet were pounding. Tedium. He played in a waste of soiled senses. He walked through a waste of frozen thoughts. He was frozen in tedium. He sat down, for he was tired. He opened his eyes. III The East Park gasped its scanty green between the loom of the streets of men and the black tumult of the river. Here he, sitting upon a bench.... Before his eyes first, two boys playing tether-ball. One of them strong and with fresh eyes swung his racket well: it rose from a clear forearm, muscle moulded, mazed with faint gold sleeping hair. His mouth shut firm as he stroked. Against him, a boy, shorter, dark, older. He lunged with mouth slant open, and dull feet. One of his eyes stared wide, the other was half shut. He lost swiftly.