he 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.

I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were
whirling wheels and steadily