olmates lay in their
instinctive recognition of his nature....

In the end he replaced the book with a firm determination never to look
at it again. But the poison was in his mind, and the book no
longer mattered.

IX

The game learned behind the big rock must never be played again--that
much was certain!

But all resolves proved vain. Fight as he may, the end was inevitably
the same.

Previously he had been the player, and had thought no more of it. Now
he was being played with, and this new form of the game kept him
see-sawing incessantly between ecstasy and agony, between the relief of
yielding and the remorse at having yielded.

His life was an unending conflict, and in the presence of that ever
renewed struggle within, by forces that seemed alien to his own self,
all else lost significance.

And there was not a thing or a person within reach that could offer an
antidote to the self-contempt corroding his soul's integrity.

X

Going to school grew very hard for a while. He could barely look his
schoolmates in the face for fear that they might read in his eyes what
sort of a chap he was. At times, on his walks to or from school with
Murray, a faintness would seize him at the mere thought that his friend
somehow might have guessed the truth. And he sent timidly envious
side-glances at one lucky enough to be raised above all temptation. For
neither his recollections of the gang gathered about the big rock nor
the more recent light shed on such things by Johan had the slightest
influence on his conception of himself as the sole black sheep in a
flock of perhaps soiled but nevertheless washable white ones.

After a while the poignancy of his emotions became blunted by
familiarity, and mere weariness forced him to accept himself on a
reduced level. A sort of new equilibrium was established within him, but
it was primarily based on indifference. Nothing really mattered. Effort
was useless. Things merely happened. No one could help what happened.
And in this fatalism, so utterly foreign to his ardent, supersensitive
nature, he found a certain momentary sense of peace.

He went about his daily classroom tasks as in a dream, doing
mechanically what he was asked, and dropping his effort as soon as the
demand for it ceased. Nothing happened during the lessons to indicate
that the teachers noticed any change in him or were in any manner
dissatisfied with him. Perhaps he was saved by an occasional flaring u