They mounted the hill slowly. The light from winking cornerlamps fell with a livid stare across the fronts of the squalid houses.
“Jim,” said Eugene, after a moment’s pause.
“Yes. What is it?”
“Don’t say anything about my getting sick,” he said awkwardly.
Surprised, Jim Trivett stared at him.
“Why not? There’s nothing in that,” he said. “Pshaw, boy, any one’s likely to get sick.”
“Yes, I know. But I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
“Oh, all right. I won’t. Why should I?” said Jim Trivett.
Eugene was haunted by his own lost ghost: he knew it to be irrecoverable. For three days he avoided every one: the brand of his sin, he felt, was on him. He was published by every gesture, by every word. His manner grew more defiant, his greeting to life more unfriendly. He clung more closely to Jim Trivett, drawing a sad pleasure from his coarse loyal praise. His unappeased desire began to burn anew: it conquered his bodily disgust and made new pictures. At the end of the week he went again, alone, to Exeter, No more of him, he felt, could be lost. This time he sought out Thelma.
When he went home for Christmas, his loins were black with vermin. The great body of the State lay like a barren giant below the leaden reek of the skies. The train roared on across the vast lift of the Piedmont: at night, as he lay in his berth, in a diseased coma, it crawled up into the great fortress of the hills. Dimly, he saw their wintry bulk, with its bleak foresting. Below a trestle, silent as a dream, a white rope of water coiled between its frozen banks. His sick heart lifted in the haunting eternity of the hills. He was hillborn. But at dawn, as he came from the cars with the band of returning students, his depression revived. The huddle of cheap buildings at the station seemed meaner and meaner than ever before. The hills, above the station flats, with their cheap propped houses, had the unnatural closeness of a vision. The silent Square seemed to have rushed together during his absence, and as he left the car and descended the
