He could not hold to this sudden and veracious vision. Himself intruded. His strong impressions, so flecked and bulged, were of less value and a greater interest. Here then, was he, among the disintegrated boys--among the seed. But with that instant, he could not go on. The boys faded back into the general hum. He did not seem to stand among them, to have an independent contact with them, to be even clearly outside of them. His mind failed to view simply him and them alone. It gave no response to this relation, it left no mark to fix on, no ring to hear as a tonality. At once, Quincy veered back to the couple he had left--and however he approached himself, there were they, also. The evening had been auspicious. Since he had ruled--an aboriginal residue in him--that an ill evening should augur ill, surely it was right to read a happy omen from a happy time. Quincy did not hesitate. As he walked home down the silent avenue where the black trees murmurously bent upon the lights, he was convinced. His firmness and grip had not gone from him! He was elated--yet certain of himself. And all of that last spring and summer, he had been a fool. The three had talked together. And it had been natural to remain till late. There had been no sign of fire or haze or friction. As he sat there, he had seemed lifted up. The supple, blue steel of the Professor’s mind had seemed the girders of a firmament whose life-invigorating breath was Julia. There had seemed no crass way of differentiating them. Of course, one was star-metal; the other was æther. But together, they had made the firmament. And within this, he had taken breath and heart. Quincy saved himself from angry laughter at his early qualms and worries and presentiments by promptly forgetting most of them. This is a common function of forgetting--to save from angry laughter. He had blithely become unaware of the intangible misgiving which like a cancer, for all its formlessness, had gnawed into the marrow of the months preceding. He had launched upon an era of confidence and dreaming. He had no inkling of the sheer dogged resolution it had required to swing his rumbling energies from their near concrete pasture into those hinterlands of fantasy and rationalization. He did not guess that this sudden melting of past worries was caused by the laborious effort of his spirit to transform itself from the true state in which such worries could be prompted--that his fresh certainty of life was due to a quick leap from the realities which must be doubtful, to dreams fashioned at will to exclude doubt. The realities were to have their revenge. The dreams, formed as an escape from them, were to be found fitless and wanting. Meantime, however, Quincy tramped bravely down the shadowed street.