"That's nothing."
"You say that. I befouled myself. I didn't pray last night. So I'm to die in sin and be damned forever."
"No. No...."
Jesse mumbled: "God-damn flask's empty." Ben's eyes were compelled to follow the motion of a brown thing soaring up from Jesse's long arm, flying, descending to the river ice and skidding off to lie still, a dot of darkness. "Don't know m' own bloody strength," said Jesse Plum, and chuckled in apology.
"Reuben, thou art no more in sin than any child of Adam."
"I let it happen. He came out of the dark. I let it happen."
"Reuben, get up on your feet!" As Reuben answered that angry shout with nothing but a sick stare, Ben searched in desperation for anything at all that might reach the boy's mind, and could find nothing, thwarted by the barrier that rises or seems to rise between one self and another, and so cried out unthinkingly: "For my sake then! Because I need thee and love thee."
Reuben Cory clung to the power of a fantasy. The snow before him, through which his feet could now drive with amazing patience and force, was not really level but a stairway. Level it was—flat level, drearily flat and white and cold—but his mind by quiet assertion made of it a stairway: because a level may indicate infinity, but a stairway, any stairway, must come to an end. Let it be a thousand miles or a thousand years away, a stairway must come to an end, for the mind refused to imagine one that went up forever, to no goal. Therefore each step was a rising, something gained toward the summit where Ben stood waiting to tell him he had done well.
By fantasy the universe might stand divided, into a region endurable and an outer region. To the outer region one must return, soon, and Reuben knew it.