.. 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.
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