He had simply transferred upon his family the rôle that they had seemed intent on giving him. Though he had combatted consciousness of it through the years of his naïve endeavors, they had forced him to see himself as an intruder. Instinctively, he reversed the order. He made of himself a world, and a society. And they who came upon him were the intruders! He had gone out with love and been refused. Here, in his world-reversal, was his mother’s part. She came to him with love. She was rejected. The machinery of his mood worked now despite himself. Though he longed for tenderness, he could not be tender; though he longed for his mother, he could not be gently passive for her advance. Something within him that was wounded turned his tenderness to spite; his inarticulate love into an expressed rebuff. The old way he had tried--of giving in the faith that he would receive, of going forward in the faith that he would be taken up. The sprouting sunward was turned in. The perfume was crushed. The tendrils were thorns. Yet what a flimsy farce was this new, lonely world of Quincy! Its very nature was the proof of his enduring need still to go forth, to love, to harmonize with others. The pith of every condition is a ground common with its opposite. * * * * * Thus came the summer. His mother’s strict surveillance over him was lifted. He was getting old, now! He was allowed to go alone on walks. And summer meant country. So far, however much he loved the wide fresh sky and the sense of cheer that country meant, it had served rather to sharpen the boy’s moods than to assuage them. For he had been hindered from meeting it alone. The tantalizing charm within the fields and woods which, left to himself, he must have grasped, evaded him, surrounded as he was by the ties of home. And these ties were strict. Had Quincy been chief in the affections of his parents, his mother could not have been more nervous, more loth to set him free. Freedom had not come as recompense for solitude. But now, at last, one day, when the mood seized him to stroll, he was not prevented. He followed the road out of the village. And then, as if a long restraint on a long hunger had suddenly been lifted, he dashed into the thick woods. At first, his strongest sense was one of fright, of discomfort, almost of embarrassment. His soul did not know what to do. His mind was conscious, dominantly, that he had not expected this reaction of _malaise_. What had his mind expected? Whence had it been prompted to expect anything? What could be rational in a sense of disappointment, sprung from nothing?