“Oh, Jonas,” he exclaimed, “aren’t you glad we’re here?” “You bet,” said Jonas. “No--I mean _we_--” The elder boy looked down, first quizzically, then with a withering wrinkle upon his eyes and nose and mouth. “For God’s sake, Quincy--what a sis you are!” Then,--“Ma says for you to stay up here,” and left the room. So Quincy was alone. * * * * * The end of that first month was the beginning of the time when Quincy began once more to breathe in a normal fashion. For long, everything had been so new, all the old ceremonies had been so suddenly replaced, all the comfortable nooks of life which with difficulty he had carved for himself in Harriet were so miserably absent, that life had become a breathless trick like trying to ride bareback (as he had once essayed), or endeavoring not to irritate his sisters. There was, for instance, the problem of eating in the ominous, overbearing dining room, the problem of sleeping in a bed which shone like the exhibition motor in the shop on Main Street, the problem of being comfortable in blouses that had to be kept clean and with thin new stockings that had to be kept whole. Also, there was the problem of loving his mother in a dazzling housegown of blue satin. These were like enemies, besetting the routes of life. And at first they had seemed insuperable. And at last they had faded quite away, and wonder about them, as well as memory, had died in the fresh, general glamor. But now, with his recovery, came a new shock. Something of adoration had persisted in Quincy toward his room-mate despite constantly recurring disillusions, rational promptings, and rebuffs. In the fixations of childish fantasy and love there is the doggedness of plant-life which persists where it has grown, though all nature conspire to prove the folly of its position. Such plants will die, or they must be uprooted. They are such stubborn things precisely because of the logic of their existence--to rise from their roots. A similar instinct was in Quincy concerning Jonas. All the persuasions of deed or mind could prevail little against his intuitive attachment, because they were in different planes. He would hold to his sentiment for Jonas until the roots of energy which had thus grown were pointedly grasped and torn away. For a seed of his life instinct was there. And where it had fallen, it had remained. In Jonas, Quincy saw a future of his own growth--a boy, happy, cherished, of importance. What aided this admiration perhaps most of all was the sense of imperviousness to life’s problems which permeated Jonas. This, in particular, was a desideratum. But, after all, these were but rationalizations. The heart of the young boy’s attachment, no young boy could understand.