Pelham watched the moving pencil, fascinated.
"Was the mountain ever like that?"
"The rocks are absolute proof. This valley,"—he gestured toward the city,—"was once the hidden center of the hill."
"... How long ago?"
Nathaniel chuckled gently. "Ah, that's beyond us. Hundreds of thousands of years, maybe."
Somehow this made the mountain more real to Pelham. Though he might climb, under the midnight stars, to the highest crag on Crenshaw Hill, he was just at the beginning of what had once been the peak. He fancied he could trace its towering crown, blacker than the surrounding blackness, lifting up to the sky and the sparkling stars.
What a fleeting second of time, to the mountain, were the eighteen laborious years that meant so much to him! This hill would continue to jut toward the clouds when the last trace of man's restless activity had crumbled into dusty forgetfulness.
He formed the habit of circling up to these crags, after a night at the club or the park with Virginia. They supplied the needed solitude for his crammed fancies. Some nights, after he had been with her, his body would burn like a torch. The pelting passion that shivered throughout him frightened him. He needed the mountain and the stars to calm him for bed. Love was becoming an overmastering torrent; it threatened to upset his whole equilibrium.
His father got wind of the affair, through some chance comment. He went straight to the point with the boy. "You're seeing a lot of that Moore girl, Pelham."
"Yes, sir.... I like her."