"Never! If you're going through three years afraid to call your souls your own, why, you ought to stand out before every one and take what's coming to you. That's my idea."
He bobbed his head and went on toward Commons.
"I don't know," said Hungerford solemnly. "It's a horror; I wish I hadn't seen it."
"I'm glad I did," said Stover slowly. "They certainly baptize us in fire up here." He remembered McCarthy with a new understanding and repeated: "We certainly learn how to take our medicine up here, Joe. It's a good deal to learn."
They wandered back toward the now quiet fence. All the crowding and the stirring was gone, and over all a strange silence, the silence of exhaustion. The year was over; what would come afterward was inconsequential.
"I wonder if it's all worth it?" said Hungerford suddenly.
Stover did not answer; it was the question that was in his own thoughts. What he had seen that afternoon was still too vivid in his memory. He tried to shake it off, but, with the obsession of a fetish, it clung to him. He understood now, not that he would yield to the emotion, but the fear of judgment that swayed men he knew, and what Regan had meant when he had referred to those who did not dare to call their souls their own.
"It does get you," he said, at last, to Hungerford.
"It does me," said Hungerford frankly, "and I suppose it'll get worse."