huge weight of misery that had sweltered in their hearts, but to which they had never dared, themselves, to give utterance.
Eugene had asked Sterling how much longer he would remain abroad and he had answered:
“Just ten months more. This is my last year. I am going home next August.” He was silent for a moment, then he added with a faint, regretful smile: “In another year I suppose, I’ll be wondering if all this has ever happened. It will seem strange and beautiful,” he said softly, “like some impossible dream!”
“Yeah!” snarled Fried, with a harsh interruption at this point. “An impossible dream! Jesus! An impossible nightmare!—that’s what you’d better say!”
Sterling looked at him silently for a moment over his thin arched hands. He smiled faintly, disdainfully, and made no answer. In a moment he turned quietly to Eugene again, and dismissing the other man with the cold contempt of silence, continued:
“Sometimes it’s hard for me to realize I ever lived there. Can there be such a place as America, I wonder?” he said with a sad faint smile. “After all this,” he gestured slightly, pausing, “it will seem so strange to be a part of”—he paused carefully “—that again…. Skyscrapers, subways, elevated trains—” he paused again, with a faint smile—“Tell me,” he said, turning toward Eugene, “do such things really exist?”
“Do they really exist!” Fried now snarled with a jeering laugh. “Do they really exist! I’ll tell the cock-eyed world that they exist!” he rasped. “You can bet your ——— that they exist!… Do they exist!” he snorted to himself derisively. “Jesus!”
Sterling stared coldly at him and said nothing. For a moment Fried’s hard, dark, embittered face, the feverish eyes, stared balefully at the fragile and sensitive face of the other youth, set disdainfully against him over his arched hands.
“Where do you get that stuff?” Fried said at length with harsh contempt. “You may kid these guys who never saw the place until a week ago, but you don’t kid me, Sterling. Christ! I know what kind of a dream it’s been—and so do you!”
Sterling did not deign to answer, but continued to look at him with cold faint disdain, and after another baleful and disgusted stare, Fried rasped out bitterly again:
“I suppose it was a dream your first term here when you tried to suck
