Somewhere, inherent in his nature, there was a love of the soil. He was particularly interested in the wagons of the farmers who stopped at the back door of the grocery with great loads of crisp cabbages, golden tomatoes, purple beets, silvery-skinned onions, long white radishes with blue tops, and turnips of the same colour, spreading into great, juicy circles of crisp tartness. He liked to slice the top from one of these, peel it, and stand biting into it like an apple, as he negotiated the purchase of the load and its transfer to the back of the grocery. Sometimes he went and stood beside the teams and slipped his slender fingers under the harness, easing it about the horses’ ears, straightening out the mane, talking to them as if they had been people. The one thing upon which he had determined was that he would not remain much longer with Peter Potter, and the other thing about which he had not determined, but concerning which in his heart he admitted the lure, was land. He would like to grow such wagonloads of fruits and vegetables as he constantly handled in Peter Potter’s grocery. He would like to own a stable filled with cows and calves and sheep and horses. He would like to have around his feet once more a flock of chickens such as he had lost upon the night when he lost everything else on earth that belonged to him except his life and the clothing he wore. He understood what it meant when boys who had scorned and taunted him at school began dropping into the grocery and asking him to the backs of certain buildings after working hours were over. Now that they knew he had money, they were willing to gamble with him. As he increased in stature and it became known that he really was a partner in Peter Potter’s business, there were boys, and girls as well, who began to be friendly and occasionally he was asked to a party or some social gathering; but not in one instance had Jason ever accepted any of these invitations. Firmly fixed in his mind were his days of privation, the days when he would have been so delighted to be included at the merry makings devised for other children, the days when his heart and brain were hungry. Now that he was mentally occupied and physically satisfied, he could not quite control the feeling of repulsion that crept up in his heart when he met with an advance on the part of any boy or girl who, once upon a time, had seared his brain and repulsed his body with the taunt: “Washerwoman’s son!” Jason knew, in the depths of his heart, that as the years passed, the same hunger for love, for companionship, for the diversions of the young around him, were even stronger than they had been as a child. He realized that there was something for which he was waiting, something that he wanted with an intensity that at times seared his body like a fever, but what it was that he wanted was not a thing that could be supplied by tardy kindness on the part of his former tormentors.