Quincy was oppressed once more. He wished to get away. His afflatus seemed asthmatic in this rigid air. In sympathy, he almost liked the towering porcelain vases. They, at least, with their quaint scrollings and flutings, seemed to aspire upwards. The rest of the room’s dead perfection was a dead weight downward. It lacked even the falsetto spirit of the vases. The family teased Sarah about them. And Quincy took his mother’s part. This troubled Adelaide to silence. Marsden seldom stooped to teasing, Josiah had leaned on Adelaide and Jonas was busy eating. So Quincy’s word won the day for the rococo vases. What was this acrid reality within his mother that brooked no blinking and ate into the substance of his dreams? Why did she make something--of all people--totter within him? Was she more _real_ than the rest of the world? He could laugh at _it_! Quincy went back to college, militant more than ever against her, yet unknowing of how great a tribute this militancy was. She was indeed more real within him than the rest of the world he laughed at. For we laugh only at things outside of us. The man lies who says he has laughed at himself--save his laughter be hysterical. Quincy could not laugh at his mother, for she was of him. But he could deny her, despise her, rail against her. In this spirit of idealism, he returned to college. And now, began the subtle _dégringolade_ toward the great cross-road where Quincy was to meet himself. The stone that starts an avalanche need not be at the summit of the precipice. It may lie far down toward the valley. And its crumbling may unleash, farther and farther upward, stone after stone, in indirect progression, until the top be loosed and the whole mountain-side crush downward. But long ere this the lowly stone that started will lie buried in the valley. Such a stone was Sarah. She lay low in the slope of her boy’s emotions. And as her stirring loosed the soil above her, she was the first to be overwhelmed. Quincy had suffered a sharp, rude shock in this reality of which she was the basis--the family that he had looked on as an outgrown cradle! This reality, the juices of his dream-life could not digest. As he left home, he therefore made his effort to cast it out. All this came rationally to the surface in fault-finding. But in the effort of rejection, a shock tremored through all of the boy’s factitious structure. And this shock was to have sequels. Julia reappeared in his dreams. Quincy instinctively feared an omen. Almost at once, Julia was no more in his dreams. He began to dream of Rhoda and of bloody scenes wherein his father suffered--nightmares in which an anonymous woman lurked vaguely, clothed in the mystery of prize and instigator. Then came a time when he could not catch his dreams at all. As he awoke, there in his mind would lift a smoke of struggle. But as he grasped at it, it went and underneath was nothing.