trains, he changed his plans suddenly and went to a good hotel.
He was touched with pride and victory. In his pockets he had $130 that he had won hardily by his own toil. He had lived alone, he had known pain and hunger, he had survived. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart. He thrilled to the glory of the secret life. The fear of the crowd, a distrust and hatred of group life, a horror of all bonds that tied him to the terrible family of the earth, called up again the vast Utopia of his loneliness. To go alone, as he had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth—it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
He thought of his own family with fear, almost with hatred. My God! Am I never to be free? he thought. What have I done to deserve this slavery? Suppose—suppose I were in China, or in Africa, or at the South Pole. I should always be afraid of his dying while I was away. (He twisted his neck as he thought of it.) And how they would rub it in to me if I were not there! Enjoying yourself in China (they would say) while your father was dying. Unnatural son! Yes, but curse them! Why should I be there? Can they not die alone? Alone! O God, is there no freedom on this earth?
With quick horror, he saw that such freedom lay a weary world away, and could be bought by such enduring courage as few men have.
He stayed in Richmond several days, living sumptuously in the splendid hotel, eating from silver dishes in the grill, and roaming pleasantly through the wide streets of the romantic old town, to which he had come once as a Freshman at Thanksgiving, when the university’s team had played Virginia there. He spent three days trying to seduce a waitress in an ice-cream and candy-store: he lured her finally to a curtained booth in a chop-suey restaurant, only to have his efforts fail when the elaborate meal he had arranged for with the Chinaman aroused her distaste because it had onions in it.
Before he went home he wrote an enormous letter to Laura James at Norfolk, a pitiable and boasting letter which rose at its
