they had to take it to save themselves. Too big a
price to pay for living (and such thread-paper lives!) but still there
did seem to be a prejudice in favor of the mere drawing of breath. Maybe
you couldn't blame them, spinning in the sunshine like insects of a day.
Some of the others had to save themselves by the wildness of a new
intoxication. They danced, their spirits danced: a carmagnole it was, a
dance of death, the death of the spirit as he saw it. But maybe, with
this preposterous love of life in them they, too, had to do it. Maybe
you couldn't blame them. He and Dick--they had been like two children,
scared out of their wits, crying out, hitting at each other in the dark.
Youth and age, that was what they had fought about. It had been an
unseemly scrap, a "you're another." Dick had been brought up against
life as it looks when you see it naked, the world--and what a world! No
wonder he swore it was a world such as neither he nor his fellows, like
him aghast, would have made. He would simply have to live some quarter
century to find out what sort of a world he and his fellows did actually
make.

And Raven: Lord! Lord! what was the use of having traveled his own
quarter century along the everlasting road if it didn't make him at
least silent in sheer pity of it: youth singing along to the Dark Tower,
jingling spurs and caracoling nag, something it didn't quite know the
feeling of shut in its nervous hand? What was it shut there? The key,
that was it: the key to the Dark Tower. Youth made no doubt it was the
key, easy to hold, quick to turn, and the gate would fly open and, if
youth judged best, even the walls would fall. And yet, and yet, hasn't
all youth held the key for that borrowed interval and do the walls ever
really fall? But if age doesn't know enough to include youth in its
understanding, as youth (except the poets) couldn't possibly include
age, why then!

"I am," thought Raven, returning to the Charlottian vernacular, "very
small potatoes and few in a hill."

And what was the Dick, the permanent Dick who would remain after a few
more years had stripped him of the merely imitative coloring he caught
from his fellows? Dick talked about "herd madness," and here was he, at
one with his own herd. He piped in verse because a few could sing,
he--but what was the use hammering along on the old dissonance: youth,
age, age, youth. And yet they needn't be dissonant. They weren't always.
There was Nan! But as t