Whether or not Berry-berry had actually been out fornicating that night was a matter of small importance to him. Some, perhaps, but in itself it was not the mystery that tormented his imagination. Clinton felt that no matter what Berry-berry did, whether away from the house or in it, he was Living. It was something that took place even when he slept, hidden in his body and under his eyelids; it was always going on, and none of the ten thousand questions he asked ever brought an answer that touched in any way the source of this deep wonder. Therefore, when Clinton began to suspect that Berry-berry intended to leave home, he grew more and more anxious about these matters until, by the time his brother actually announced his plans, his panic was so great that the thought of being left behind made him vomit.

It was at this time that he conceived the Mildred Murphy plan, whereby his brother could secretly send for him. But when he found the address had been left behind, a belief took shape in him that he could not himself have put into words. It was this: that Life had conspired to avoid him altogether. For a while he halfheartedly hoped to find some sign of Life in the Old Neighborhood, but after snooping around over there for more than a month, he gave up that hope. Life was a thing that took place out of his presence: it went on in a room just before he entered it and took up again after he left; it was on the other end of a telephone wire, in envelopes he could not get hold of that were delivered to other houses, in all books except those he could lay hands on himself; and surely it moved along with Berry-berry, inside of him on that vague and dimly lighted, hard-to-imagine road he traveled.

This, then, was his private terror: that these mysteries would never unfold. He would not be sent for. It is a sad fact that the futility of a desire will not wipe it out; and so, this longing that had come to being in him, that had taken to parading around inside him, mostly in his chest, would have to be dealt with in some private way. He believed that the thing had begun to nibble at his heart, at his sanity. The symptoms alarmed him: at fourteen he had no nails left to bite and had set to work on the cuticles, he smoked regularly, did conversations, and the very thought of sitting in a schoolroom caused him physical anguish. It occurred to him that poor Annabel might have good grounds for her worries. If privately he believed there could be no letup in his bad behavior, he could not admit it to her. She would never understand that it all had to do with Berry-berry, and the thing that pranced around inside him.

Annabel had said to Ralph: “He misses his brother,” and the enormity of this understatement, spoken in those soft, cooing tones, had made him want to beat his head against the laundry chute until his brain was raw. But now, with the burden of all her talk and the letter resting in his notebook, he again felt sympathy for her. By the time he arrived home, he had made a decision.