“Did you ever read this?” he said quietly, turning to the other youth, and handing him the book. It was a copy of George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man: the other replied he had not read it.
“Then,” said Starwick, “why don’t you take it along with you? It’s really quite amusing.” He switched off the light above the bookshelves, took off his glasses with a quiet tired movement, and folding them and putting them in his breast pocket, came back to the table and sat down.
“I think it may interest you,” he said.
Although the other boy had always felt an instinctive repulsion towards books which someone else urged him to read, something in Starwick’s simple act had suddenly given the book a strange rare value: he felt a strange and pleasurable excitement when he thought about it, and was instantly eager and curious to read it. Moreover, in an indefinable way, he had understood, the moment that Starwick turned to him, that he was giving, and not lending him the book; and this act, too, instantly was invested with a princely and generous opulence. It was this way with everything that Starwick did: everything he touched would come instantly to life with grace and joy; his was an incomparable, an enslaving power—a Midas-gift of life and joy almost too fortunate and effortless for one man to possess and in the end, like all his other gifts of life and joy, a power that would serve death, not life, that would spread corruption instead of health, and that finally would turn upon its owner and destroy him.
Later, when they left his rooms and went out on the street, the sensuous quickening of life, the vital excitement and anticipation which Starwick was somehow able to convey to everything he did and give to everyone he knew and liked, was constantly apparent. It was a fine clear night in early October, crispness and an indefinable smell of smoke were in the air, students were coming briskly along the street, singly or in groups of two or three, light glowed warmly in the windows of the book-shops, pharmacies, and tobacco stores near Harvard Square, and from the enormous library and the old buildings in the Harvard Yard there came a glow of lights, soft, rich, densely golden, embedded in old red brick.
All of these things, vital, exciting, strangely, pleasurably stirring as they were, gained a curious enhancement from Starwick’s presence until they gave to the younger boy not only a feeling of sharp, mounting, strangely indefinable excitement, but a feeling of power and wealth—a sense of being triumphant and having before him the whole golden and unvisited plantation of the world to explore, possess and do with as he would—the most
