“Good-bye,” she said softly, and so left the room.
XVI
The rest of the year was a shadow under which he walked.
He abandoned himself completely. He let his life slip utterly from his hands. It was as if it had been a thing so strange and so repugnant, that it was useless, even as it was loathsome, to keep it with him. So he allowed himself, without effort or regret, to slip away.
He did not go back to the Deering house, nor did he ever again shake Professor Deering’s hand. These were things that had gone from him with his dreams. He did his work. He spoke more affably than before, to his comrades. He even joined them a little in their activities. But it was vacant intercourse.
The woods were redolent of bitter memories, so he avoided them. When he walked through them their rebuke prompted him to run. And when he ran, as of old, their rich suggestion held him back. So he abandoned both.
He joined the track-team in the spring. But he ran badly, now that he strained so to win his race. The students had not forgiven him. They saw him come, and when he failed to prove his worth, they dropped him without a glimmer of regret.
His dreams he turned savagely against, and against all that nurtured them, or harbored them or swung in tune with them. He gave up reading. He proved to himself that art was a mockery, and culture a delusion. He turned toward science, about which—knowing nothing of it—he could find no ancient landmark of himself to hate. He came to disapprove of college. He decided to lead a useful life and to obey his mother. He believed that at last he had found a way to gain his family’s respect and that their past evaluation of his merits had come very near the truth. But now, he was done with the clouds of fancy. He knew he had a good mind. He would set it to some concrete plow and make, at last, a concrete furrow for his life.
He told his father that he had had enough of college. He asked him, after a short vacation, to find a place for him in business—that he might enter in the fall. His father agreed, looking at him queerly, asking no question. His mother said: “Well, you lasted longer than Jonas.” Rhoda congratulated him and Adelaide seemed hurt. But none of these typical reactions worried Quincy. He had known what to expect.
He decided that he must cultivate his brother, Marsden. He sensed the cripple’s flinty empiricism, and this seemed to him the proper weapon to beat away, once and for all time, the residue of dream that clogged his life.