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alone at all. So in the summer and fall I walk when I can in the morning.”
    “This is a beautiful morning,” Andrews said.
    “Yes,” Francine said. “It’s very cool.”
    “Well,” Andrews said doubtfully, and started to move away, “I suppose I’ll leave you to your walk.”
    Francine smiled and put her hand on his arm. “No. It’s all right. You walk with me for a while. We’ll talk.”
    She took his arm, and they walked slowly up and down the street, speaking quietly, their voices distinct in the morning stillness. Andrews moved stiffly; he did not look often at the girl beside him, and he was conscious of every muscle that moved him with her. Though afterward he thought often about their walk, he could not remember anything they said.
    He saw Charley Hoge more frequently. Usually their conversations were brief and perfunctory. But once, casually, in a remote connection, he mentioned that his father was a lay minister in the Unitarian Church. Charley Hoge’s eyes widened, his mouth dropped incredulously, and his voice took on a new note of respect. He explained to Andrews that he had been saved by a traveling preacher in Kansas City, and had been given a Bible by that same man. He showed Andrews the Bible; it was a cheap edition, worn, with several pages torn. A deep brownish stain covered the corners of a number of the pages; Charley explained that this was blood, buffalo blood, that he had got on the Bible just a few years ago; he wondered if he had committed, even by accident, a sacrilege; Andrews assured him that he had not. Thereafter Charley Hoge was eager to talk; sometimes he even went to the effort of seeking Andrews out to discuss with him some point of fact or question of interpretation about the Bible. Soon, almost to his surprise, it occurred to Andrews that he did not know the Bible well enough to talk about it even on Charley Hoge’s terms—had not, in fact, ever read it with any degree of thoroughness. His father had encouraged his reading of Mr. Emerson, but had not, to his recollection, insisted that he read the Bible. Somewhat reluctantly, he explained this to Charley Hoge; Charley Hoge’s eyes became lidded with suspicion, and when he spoke to Andrews again it was in the tone of evan-gelicism rather than equality.
    As he listened to Charley Hoge’s exhortations, his mind wandered away from the impassioned words; he thought of the times, short months before, when he had been compelled to be present each morning at eight at King’s Chapel in Harvard College, to listen to words much like the words to which he listened now. It amused him to compare the crude barroom that smelled of kerosene, liquor, and sweat to the austere dark length of King’s Chapel where hundreds of soberly dressed young men gathered each morning to hear the mumbled word of God.
    Listening to Charley Hoge, thinking of King’s Chapel, he realized quite suddenly that it was some irony such as this that had driven him from Harvard College, from Boston, and thrust him into this strange world where he felt unaccountably at home. Sometimes after listening to the droning voices in the chapel and in the classrooms, he had fled the confines of Cambridge to the fields and woods that lay southwestward to it. There in some small solitude, standing on bare ground, he felt his head bathed by the clean air and uplifted into infinite space; the meanness and the constriction he had felt were dissipated in the wildness about him. A phrase from a lecture by Mr. Emerson that he had attended came to him: I become a transparent eyeball. Gathered in by field and wood, he was nothing; he saw all; the current of some nameless force circulated through him. And in a way that he could not feel in King’s Chapel, in the college rooms, or on the Cambridge streets, he was a part and parcel of God, free and uncontained. Through the trees and across the rolling landscape, he had been able to see a hint of the distant horizon to the west; and