Each of these human beings seemed to have a passion: it was the burden of all their words. They could talk nothing else. They could partake of nothing foreign to their passion. If they could have changed their pasts, they might have spoken a different thing. David, relaxed in the play of words and rain, saw how the faces of these men and women were stamps of life: how life had branded each as with a burning iron. He thought of his mother. Did she have a mark and a passion also? David was out of the group on the porch. Its passionate tourneys of talk were far away and yet their character was sharp. When he awoke in the morning in the room that had always been his--he would never see it again--he sat up in his bed, he looked about at the strange salience of familiar objects. The yellow oak bureau, the picture of Washington crossing the Delaware, his own black boots, his own gray cap stood forth with an uncanny clearness as if he had come from a two-dimensioned world. This feeling passed. Now here it was again, as he listened to words. He had it watching away at the drenched woods and the lake. His neighbors, tense in their chairs, took on the conciseness of automata. He felt them pour into words, he felt the unease of their restraint when they were interrupted, forced to listen to another, he felt how they crouched in these forced silences and hurled themselves back into speech at the first hint of pause. In silence they lay flopping like fishes out of water. Words were their element.... And David saw the breathing of the woods, the warm comfort of trees that had grown up together and knew their silences. They were clothed in a sweet sanctity of resolve and repose. They took the rain with faint bowed heads. They were alive, in David, and very thoughtful. For suddenly they too were remote. They too had the sharpness of the completely strange. David had slipt from the reality of men and nature. He thought of his mother. All life about him was marvelous and clear like the objects in his old room--he would never see it again--when he saw them with eyes still full of his night’s dream. She had died that May. Until a few years ago she had talked a great deal with him. Their talk dwindled. The open space of their few words became an easeful place for him to lie in. He withdrew more and more to it. She died almost silent. They lived together in the white house where he remembered his father. His father left his violin, left always David’s picture of him. A heavy and loose man, ashift in his clothes, with long dead hands that came alive, at times, playing gigues. Then his feet danced along and his mother’s eyes were rigid. David played his violin when it was all of him left. He looked at his hands and began to play out of tune. His mother had no ear for that. She said: “Why do ye stop, dear?” “Mother,” he said, “aren’t my hands fat and childish?”