Still, the boy’s energies pricked him on. There was no tremor of hesitation in his walk or in his face. But it was as if the spirit that had forged these energies by which he was now acting, had flickered out. As the light of a star, after the star has died, pierces through space uncaring, so it seemed that Quincy pursued his goal, with his source gone. All this about him seemed to have sapped his soul. It was all so huge and crass and crushing. It cared so little for him. He was a particle within it, too light to sink, too heavy to ascend. The crowd. And the boy on his way to college. He had not reckoned on this thing. He had lived within it all of his life. Yet, until this moment, it had been as remote as non-existence. Now, ere he knew how, it was at work upon him. And already, he was weary! Quincy knew enough--just enough--to be horrified at this; to feel the fitness of a venturing spirit, eager, elastic, for a beginning; and to grow sick at the lack. He did not know enough even to blame the crowd. Nor did he know that the glad face and joyous limbs of the pioneer are figments of fable-weaving; that the mood of the morning is ever a grim facing forward against the soul’s pull backward; and that he shared this weariness that so distressed him with most men who, aching of sinew and sick of heart, go out and win. An impulse murmured to go back. He crushed it. Back, there was all he yearned to overcome. The impulse which made it preferable to the unknown filled him with shame. He had not been this shirker, two years past. He trudged on. Before him, was much unknown, but one thing certain--Struggle. As he envisaged this, a part of Quincy blanched. It was not because he feared; because he lacked daring for pain or for discomfort. Both of these lay behind him. He thought, and rightly, to have sounded them. What was unbearable in the future was the struggle, the exertion. Whatever the fruit of it, with struggle the price seemed vain. Whatever the bitter emptiness he left behind, since he could lie still and without deeds, seemed welcome. While the world shrieked about him, horrible in its clangor of steel and its dull delirium of feet, Quincy was filled with the desire to share nothing with it, to cut loose, aloof, to cast out whatever element he might conceal in common. He was weary because this crowd seemed tireless; he craved peace because it breathed out conflict; he longed for abnegation, though it was failure, since the crowd was as it was, with its attainment. Subreptively, unformed, the desire stirred within him, if this hideous pervasion was life, for non-existence.