Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly. * * * * * The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with the rest of the feed merchant's family, thought me slightly "touched," still they liked the unusual things I said about the stars ... and about great men whose biographies I was reading ... and about Steele's Zoology I was studying, committing all the Latin nomenclature of classification to heart, with a curious hunger for even the husks and impedimenta of learning.... Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature. Alva was gawky and younger. She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and long-shanked. Her face was sallow and full of freckles. In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen stove, alone, studying our lessons,--the place given over entirely to us for our school work. A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known. When all my power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,--the thought of their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to bed. I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn. * * * * * I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by no means my last, I hopped a freight. I was absent several weeks. When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father was so glad to see me he didn't whip me. He was, in fact, a little proud of me. For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled through the various states, as salesman, not many years before. And after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I grew talkative about my adventures, too. I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not averse to my getting a job. He took out papers for me, and gave me work under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works. My wage was three dollars a week. My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips to dry. In the Composite Works I discovered a new world--the world of factory life.