I wanted, was in search of, something ... something ... maybe other worlds could give this something to me ... what vistas of infinite imagination I saw about me in the wide-stretching, star-sprinkled sky!
Dreaming of other worlds swinging around other suns, seething with strange millions of inhabitants, through all space, I took to reading books on astronomy ... Newcomb ... Proctor's Other Worlds ... Camille Flammarion ... Garret Serviss as he wrote in the daily papers ... and novels and romances dealing with life on the moon, on Mars, on Venus....
During my night-rovings I lay down in dark hollows, sometimes, and prayed to God as fervently as if the next moment I might expect His shining face to look down at me out of the velvet, far-reaching blackness of night:
"O God, make me pure, and wonderful ... let me do great things for humanity ... make me handsome, too, O God, so that girls and women will love me, and wonder at me, in awe, while I pass by unperturbed—till one day, having kept myself wholly for her as she has kept herself for me,—give me then the one wonderful and beautiful white maiden who will be mine ... mine ... all and alone and altogether, as I shall be all and alone and altogether hers. And let me do things to be wondered at by watching multitudes, while bands play and people applaud."
Such was my mad, adolescent prayer, while the stars seemed to answer in sympathetic silence. And I would both laugh and weep, thrilled to the core with ineffable, enormous joy because of things I could not understand ... and I would want to shout and dance extravagantly.
The Jenkins girls were curious about me, and while they, together with the rest of the 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.