And in the office, the dread rhythm was continued. Here, men, boys, girls were drawn together, the secret of their lives apart forever a little dimmer in their eyes. And here, unendingly, they stayed with no hope more bright than that fortune hold them there, since that hold was living, and with no intercourse more high than that of wolves sharing a carcass, through want of strength, not will, to drive each other off. How poor a thing it was for which each day, they shook off their souls, trampled those flowers, their thoughts, to conjoin and fit in here! And yet, little as they accomplished, that little was not theirs. Theirs was merely the naked hold on living, the taste of the shared carcass,--life. But was this living? Decomposition rather--the blind, inglorious making of chalk cliffs! Quincy could almost see the process. Soon the spirit they were forever starving would die, and the flowers they were forever trampling would cease to bloom. And if the rotting carcass grew not noisome to them, it must inexorably be that their senses were rotting also. And lo! a higher city, from their miserable contribution. Quincy was alert to the danger of these feelings. He sensed in them a recrudescence of the life he had determined to shut out. He resolved not to see these things since to do so was to have eyes and to have eyes was to have tears. He elected to look upon these things as a treachery to the new self which he believed was born--strong and rebellious--from his past mistakes. His effort to shake off such thoughts, trample such moods, he chose to know as will. And his savage muting of the least vibrance in him toward his surroundings, he chose to know as strength. He had not yet learned of the power and the efficiency of weakness. And so, from the first loathing, grew a system of defenses; from the first bewilderment, a hedge of rationalization--the world’s course, miniatured.... It had been a common way with Quincy to bear about with him an undigested load of his past experiences. So it had been in childhood, in love; so it was still. The pitiful unknitting of his life at college had been no analysis at all. Even as the pattern of the effect of home upon him had been the later consequence of tracing back from its felt stamp, so now, away from it, Quincy was to attempt a reason of his abandoning college.