All his life he had known that he was destined to become a man. An ecstasy, this, of wonderment and terror which ran, in a kaleidoscope of color, back to his childhood and to the time when his little arms had clasped his mother’s knees. _Some day he would grow up and be a man._ Whenever he heard these words inside him, they came by his mother’s voice. For she had brought them first like a fire to his life. She had burned him with them as a reproof, or thrilled him with their glow of destiny, or when her slow hands and her mouth upon him told of their imminent loss, lighted him as a sacrifice with their mysterious meaning. For in these words was a world beyond his mother. In them, coming from her mouth and from her breast that he loved, David knew the ruthless rhythm of his life away from childhood up to the passion of maturity: away from his mother to a motherless cold land for his own mastership. This destiny could be many things. It was a twinkling star he looked at from his safe world and laughed against: it was a fairy-field near only in his fancy, far from his being, dominioned by the will of his young ignorance: it was a menace from which he fled to his mother and toward which the vigor of his mother’s love yet drove him. He stood at his manhood’s threshold, not daring to turn back. A deep and cavernous beginning. A passage lost in shadows. Not seeing the passage, he dared to enter. His mother’s going had been the bidding of her love that he should leave her. But David was not alone. A part of him was still the short and sturdy child that clasped his mother’s knees. All this was changed, and all this was eternal. For now, again, David was not alone. Tom who had shown him the coming of his manhood would accompany him through it.... His friend and comrade: though David knew it not, in a way marvelously true and false the legate of his mother. VIII David lived alone for a little more than a year. Already in that year’s Spring the two friends decided to find a place together. Their living room opened from a narrow hall. Along a darkness, sidling, their two bedrooms, symbols of our forbidding attitude toward sleep as a dull thing crowded between bright periods of bustle. They blinked, these rooms, with their hopeless single eyes flat on the gray bricks of the adjoining house: blinked like purblind old women against something too close for focus. Here, sleep was imprisoned, that might heal men from the poison of their days, but that men have turned into a merely deeper and more occult brew of their days’ poisons.