Frankly, he gave it up. It was beyond him. If he could have analyzed Bernie he felt he could have analyzed himself. He decided that she was simply a small-town girl even as he was a small-town boy, only he was trying to put all his handicaps, vicissitudes and experiences to a constructive purpose, so far as he had the light, and Bernie was not and never had tried. There he had to let the matter rest, never realizing how near the truth he had stumbled. Yet in all this hectic analysis business, in all this vicious contact with parental mediocrity, in all his heart-breaking experience with The Sex as he had known The Sex thus far, the boy had never once grasped an explanation as simple and obvious and plain as sunlight—and as common as mud. He had lived for twenty-seven years among people of half-developed or deficient mentality. He had been surfeited with persons “who had no brains.” Looking upon the men and women he had known, especially the women, he had observed that they possessed bodies, limbs, heads, faces. They moved about, they talked, they ate, they slept. To all outward intents and purposes, excepting perhaps for a certain vacancy across the eyes, they were no different than the most profound philosophers who had ever walked the earth. And because they possessed bodies, limbs, heads, faces, because they moved about at their daily activities, talked, ate, slept, he had subconsciously expected them to know all, see all, be all, and impart to him a birthright heritage of mental and spiritual nutrition for which his growing soul and spirit hungered. The nearest he had ever approximated this was when he said of his mother, “She can’t help it; she’s made that way.” It was not that his mother was “made that way” so much as it was that she had not been made anything better or finer or greater. And the same general hypothesis applied pretty well to all those who had surrounded him. Mediocrity was only mental limitation. It was not default of intelligence, as he had always assumed. It was boundary. Beyond a certain point, God seemed to have ordained that certain mortals should not pass.