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“Sol, don’t remind me of his old wildness,” said Mrs. Felman, with a peevish dread. “I still remember the time when he staggered along the sidewalk in front of all the neighbors. Is there anything bad that he hasn’t done, I want to know?”

One evening, just before running away from home, Carl had taken some tiny bottles of whiskey from his father’s overcoat, without curiosity, but longing for the feeling of sly self-assurance that had balanced his blood from former sneaking sips. He had repaired with the bottles to a neighboring public park and emptied them in swiftly nervous gulps, enjoying the vastly kinglike sneer at the world which had brushed aside his melancholy uncertainties.

“I am a poet!” he had cried out to the murmuring patience of the trees around him, “and fools will some day gape along my road, and the open circles of their mouths will be like the rims of beggars’ cups. My voice will rise above the dreamless clink of their coins and they will stop and look at me, as though I were a pilgrim-problem. An angry amazement will lend its little catastrophe to their faces. Yes, I will drop beauty to them, in clearly abundant handfuls, and they will sit quarreling over its value and tossing me an occasional penny. But I will never stop to join their discourses. My feet will be lighter than breezes and more direct. I am a poet, and the world is stagnation that I must ever torment!”