All that was most himself wanted to rise in wild rebellion against conclusions that found no support in anything he had actually experienced so far.  He wanted to refuse belief.  He sought for escapes as if the fulfilment of the doom pronounced by the book had been a matter of minutes.  But there was the book, and to back it suddenly appeared a line of experiences out of his own life.

Perhaps those who would not let him visit their homes had only too good cause for refusal.  Perhaps, after all, it was not his father’s position but something about himself that had caused the parents of Harald, of Loth, and now of Murray, to act in exactly the same way.  Perhaps Dally had reasons for not letting him become primus which, out of his soul’s kindness, he never told even to Keith himself.  Perhaps the reason he always felt isolated and out of touch with his schoolmates 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.