But all of this was, after all, no wondrous vision or wondrous might coming to Quincy. So it did not seem even to him, although in contrast to the darkness and debility of his former states, he might well have been pardoned if it had. Quincy was not, of a sudden, over his stammering and his stumbling. He had exhausted two extremes of error. He was bound--he was sure--to be, this time, less wrong than he had been. As the wise East has said: All progress is through a series of disgusts. Here he was, then, twenty-two, earning his living, living alone--unhampered by too great devotion either for any man or for any woman. He had the feeling, now that the City no longer troubled him, that family was gone, and business ran smooth, of being able to swing his arms and legs without obstruction. This was his start. Here was his race. During it, his sense of progress was in the things he passed. Until the end, he would not know in his weariness how fast and hard he had gone; in his position how far and whither he had come. The rest of the consciousness of Quincy was to be the consciousness of motion. He had himself now, to traverse, to judge, to reckon with. His freedom of external bars did not give him freedom, did not make him light. But it loosed him upon the realler things. It gave him a movement wherein, for the first time, really to know. And a dark thing known is a dark thing made light. A heavy thing in motion is a heavy thing to stop. Here, then, was Quincy’s start within himself. At last, he was flowing forward--all of him, from depth to surface. He had bent back reality to fit childish loves of mother or of dream; he had warped the natural offshoot of these loves to make them fit reality; he had denied one or the other, twisted them, dammed up his life’s current in order to have a smooth lake for lolling or a dry place for forgetting. This was over. He was flowing forward. Stormily, muddily, cramped. But yet, a passage.... III Quincy sat on a rock that formed part of a stone fence. About him were briars of blackberry in bloom. It was May. Before him, the brow of the hill rose gently a half hundred feet. And above that was the falling sun. Its golden glow flushed the green stretch; little innumerable shadows, greyish purple, were in those depths of the grass where the sun could not enter. A single tree--an elm--stood between the skyline and Quincy’s fence, just to the left of the sun. The wind skimmed up the hill and turned the elm-leaves silver. Below Quincy’s back, through a thick fringe of elder and maple bushes, was a collaret of locust trees. And in the valley was a little town. Its murmurs rose and mingled with the trill of the trees. A subtle counterpoint met Quincy’s ears--a fugue of leaf and whistle and children’s voices; of a motor-horn and a girl’s laugh and a raven’s crow; of an infant’s cry and a wagon’s crunch and a cricket....