move them.

"A W--you have seen it, heard it, smelled it. Can't you
explain--miraculously touched with the gift of lucidity for fact as you
are for the fictions of production, overhead and dividends? Oh, not to
Mama--either she understands better than I or not at all--but to the Old
Man or Connie?

"As a child you learn for the first time of death: the heart is
shuttered in a little cell, too cruel for breathing; the sun is gray. In
an instant you forget; the sky is bright; the blood pounds. Years later
the adolescent falls in love with death; primps his spirit for it;
recalls in unpresumptuous brotherhood Shelley and Keats and Chatterton.
Afterward the flush fades; we are reconciled to life, but the promise is
still implicit. Now, however, it must be earned, awaited. Haste would
destroy the savor. The award assured, pace becomes dignified.

"But death is not death; life is never mocked. The Grass is not death
any more than it is evil. The Grass is the Grass. It is me and I am it;
'in my father's house there are many mansions, if it were not so I would
not have told you.'

"No, I suppose not; yet it hurts my liver to offer the old boy
incomprehensible reasons or verbiage like 'compulsion neurosis' when all
he wants is to protect me from my own impulses as he protected me from
the army. Florence and I delight in him--he comes again next week if
possible--but we cannot convey to him the unthinkableness of
leaving...."

I heard about this visit later from the general. Joe had scoured Chicago
for the alcoholic commodities now practically unprocurable, and returned
in triumph to the couple's furnished room. There they entertained him
with two bottles of cointreau and a stone demijohn of cornwhisky.
"Touched ... filial affection ... even drank the cointreau--fiddling
stuff, no wonder it was still available in the drought ... better son a
man never had....

"Girl's all right. Moved in circles ... perhaps not accustomed ... bit
rough in speech, but heart of gold ... give you the shirt right off her
back ... hum ... manner of speaking ... know what I mean...."

But she would not add her persuasions to those of the general. "Joe's
got to stay. It's not something he sat down and thought up, the way you
plan dinner or whether blue goes good with your new permanent. He's got
to stay because he's got to stay. And of course, so do I. We couldnt be
satisfied anywhere we couldnt see the Grass. Life's too dull away from
it ... b