Besides, the temptation toward hypocrisy was enormous.  The school was honeycombed with holy spies who imputed it merit to report the laxity of others.  And, once you professed open belief, everything immediately grew easy and smooth—­even to the winning of scholarships there, and, on graduation, in the chief colleges of the land.

So, suddenly, I took to testifying at prayer meetings, half believing I meant it, half because of the advantages being a professed Christian offered.  And the leaders sang and rejoiced doubly in the Lord over the signal conversion of so hard and obdurate a sinner as I.

* * * * *

One day, as I was marching in line from the chapel, a queer thing took place....

One of the boys whom I could not identify hissed, “Go on, you hypocrite!” at me.

* * * * *

In a few weeks the pendulum swung as far to the other extreme.  My hypocrisy made me sick of living in my own body with myself.  I threw off the transient cloak of assumed belief.  Once more I attacked the stupidity of belief in a six-day God, inventor of an impossible paradise, an equally impossible hell.

* * * * *

In the early spring I left school before the term was over, impatient, restless, at odds with the faculty ...  Stanton termed it “under a cloud.”  I had my eyes set on another ideal.

* * * * *

Down in the mosquito-infested pine woods of New Jersey Stephen Barton had located.  Barton was possessed with the dream of making the men and women of the world physically perfect—­a harking back to the old Greeks with their worship of the perfection of bodily beauty and health.  I had long been a reader of his magazines, a follower of his cult, and, now that I heard of his planning to build a city out in the open country, where people could congregate who wished to live according to his teachings, I enrolled myself ardently as one of his first followers and disciples....

Barton had taken over a great barn-like, abandoned factory building that stood on the shore of an artificial lake—­which, in his wife’s honour, he re-named after her, Lake Emily ... his wife was a fussy Canadian woman who interfered in everyone’s affairs beyond endurable measure.  I was told she used to steal off the chair the old clothes Barton used to wear by preference—­paddling along the winding creek in a canoe to his work each morning, his pants rolled up to the knees—­and put in their stead a new, nicely creased suit!

* * * * *

Barton’s face was wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs—­one of the boys who had known him a long time said his chief sorrow was that he could never develop his legs the way he wished them to be.