“I do not understand.” “Nor I. I want to be sincere. I want to be strong enough to be always, always sincere, as I am now sincere only with you.” “Tom, what does all this mean?” “Can’t you believe me when I tell you, I do not understand? I try, Davie! It hurts. You ask me for help. I have helped you often, Davie. Perhaps most when I seemed cruel and harsh and distant. Isn’t that true? But you seem to think I must be always strong. My mind--my poor mind you expect so much of, Davie--I hate it at times, because, if it has helped you, it has done me disservice. It has estranged us. I am weak, also. Oh, dear, dear Boy, I am weaker than you! You spoke of a woman who is to be a Mother. What is so strong as such a woman? Her fidelity to her child, her confidence, her vast unuttered love of which all her being is symbol. The breath she takes, the food she eats--is for a purpose. That is strength, David. Even if she cannot name her child, or, call it. And you are indeed like that. You have a strength a little like that woman. I love you for that, David! I have no such purpose. When one has purpose, growing within one,--one’s flesh and blood,--it is easy to be sincere. When one has no such purpose, it is hard....” “Tom, you do not know how you hurt me.” “Will you stand those hurts, for my sake?” Why should he? Why should he? What load of service was Tom placing upon him? And the reasons for this? Tom was speaking again: “----all I can say is that all my life seems suddenly to run on edge. Off-track. It is hard to explain ... two lines faintly divergent at first, yet how they widen!... Some little dissonance deep in my heart, and it creeps into all the words I say, at times, into all the acts I do: the discord widens and multiplies. Until it--_shrieks_! Do you understand at all?” No, David could not understand. Tom could not understand. With bleeding nerves, he had made this symbol of his self-division. It was beautifully true. But to make the symbol was not to understand it. Yet, although neither saw, they were impressed. Tom’s words were nonsense, perhaps: but they were like song. They held their hearers. The more raptly since neither knew that this was music. So birds, perhaps, listen to song and dimly descrying its beauty, which is its meaning, obey its call. David was silent. He was near Tom. A new plenitude in Tom that hurt him no less than the emptiness he had feared. A very faint pull from himself, a very faint losing of balance. As it went on, from deep within him, invisibly deep, it widened toward the world. Tom sat still, seeing his hurt, seeing he could not heal it. He had to watch a bleeding he could not stem. He watched it, now: with David watching him. He saw the dissonant thing that spread and shattered his world: he saw the deepest of his thrusts to right himself die far from the mark....