big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at heart—the “He-men” were on the rails.
And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was “a boy with a fine spirit.” She said it very often.
He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a creature that was dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his life, either at home or in school, he had seldom known victory. Fear he knew well. And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the jostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.
He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame. But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne—it must go to Parnassus.
