And then, though he did not move from the bed, Berry-berry saw himself kneeling on the floor and he took the foot in his lap. In his imagination, he saw himself touch, with his hand, gently, the incredible living flesh of his brother’s leg; and as he did so, he knew instantly, and in a way that he had never known before, that there is life in other people than himself, blood and spirit, vulnerability, a heartbeat, a pulse; and he experienced as well, at that instant, in that imagined contact with the livingness of another being, a wave of tenderness so profound that he yearned for its continuance. It seemed that all that he had sought to find with his fists and his tongue and his sex had been yielded to him in a moment, with no effort at all. But coming to him, as it did, from the depths of his own sense of sin, he was fearful of the experience, as if it had in it all the cunning of some supreme punishment: it was his only to be withdrawn from him. Clinton had come here to do violence to him, but he had brought instead a knowledge of love, a knowledge that Berry-berry would be forced to relinquish at the moment his brother awakened. And that would be his doom. He would never in the future be able to submerge himself in purely carnal pursuits, because this moment was inscribing in him the indelible knowledge of their limitations. He would be condemned to go along always, all through his life, carrying with him the intolerable memory of what he had surrendered: the power to know and respect and love the living truth of another.