His hands go up. And his hands receive. He is lifted from his cradle. He is pressed full and hard against this Quantity--his mother. It is all his doing, since his little hands went up. A feeling of infinite rightness floods him, crinkling his body. He gives up all his being to this sense, as he lies there embraced. A compact of fellowship and intercourse is signed in the imprint of his fingers upon her breast, her hair, her curiously protruding nose and eyes and mouth. He is wafted back upon a past which his mind militantly denies. All life begins with just this surging backward--synchronous with all life’s struggle, the command to wrench desire forward. But in his mother’s arms, the struggle dies and the primordial impulse swells to the full. Quincy is unabashed by this joy that holds him, when his mother holds him, making him warm and needless; making him happy to revert to a complete dark dependence. For Quincy has no morality. He has only logic. He is in the hand of love. And he is willing. His world broadens vastly. His power to embrace his world soon meets its limit. It seems, then, that his world has shrunk. The cruel process of unfolding is incessant with its burden of surprises. All of life, then, assumes surprise as its tonal color. All of life becomes a swelling forth from self into new shadows. These harden to a part of substance. And the act begins afresh. New shadows. New crystallizings. New flooding-forth. Yet, through it all resounds still a chord of harmony,--himself. But already, the chord is minor. Already, Quincy grows aware of a bewildering congeries of other things. He still persists throughout, but in a note that lessens. And this is why the minor chord is sorrowful. * * * * * Gradually, then, life was resolving itself in its full force to Quincy. He knew need and space and limitation. He was to know hostility and hate. In his world, came from time to time a massive creature with a face that stayed very far away. Generally, this occurred before a flood of darkness. At first the sense aroused was one of immateriality. This person was of no consequence. He loomed up, noised about, and then the gentle time stole over the great world. But Quincy learned ere long, now he was growing wise, that matters are not always what they seem. It was a great blow to Quincy. From his father, indeed, the infant came to feel a new quality of apartness. If his mother’s independence had been established, it was still always within the bounds of a strong empire--that empire, himself. Beyond this, her separateness had no impulse to break. But with his father it was different. He was not only apart in his movements and effects; he seemed connected by no bond whatever to the dominion that was Quincy! Indeed, his being, thrust ever within Quincy’s world, seemed an affair entirely fortuitous.