His mind was lively, and he enjoyed and employed its energy, but he was not ambitious. He had been supplied with books, and further books that those first books suggested; but he had never known a real teacher. Sarah had been friend, mother, sponsor, advocate, protector, playmate. She had pointed and encouraged, but she had not really been his teacher except at the very beginning. And at least one inspired, mad, total teacher is necessary to change a life, to charge a good mind with ambition and appetite for the world beyond.

Much is observed of the violent changes in the body of an adolescent boy, but the chaos of mind and heart is at least as extreme.

Knowing that he was the first boy who had ever felt this way, Roman experienced the things every boy does—celestial elation and suicidal depression, lust a thousand times more throbbing than the wildest beating of a heart, and asceticism cold enough to chill a Siberian saint.

His hands groped the flesh of his body everywhere they could reach, not only his genitals, but there too. He gripped his biceps, his calves, the rounds of his behind. He kissed his shoulders, smelled under his arms, licked the insides of his wrists and elbows, admired the curving of thigh and chest, fearfully explored with his fingers the hunched back, and finally decided that he was not altogether repulsive. Although he did not think of her—how could he, when touching his own body?—Sarah’s having told him that he was handsome made it possible for him to accept his body the way it was.

And when hands did not grope and explore, he lay on the bed of his room back of the kitchen and pantries, blessedly isolated from the whole world; and he lay there like a holy man, as unaware of his body as if he had been true disembodied spirit.

But he burned; more often than not he burned. His special kind of childhood had not deprived him of the knowledge of sex that is the common lot, and so he made the usual bridge between his sexual feelings and the idea of the female body. Actually, there did not seem to Roman to be any connection. But the notion of a breast brings to mind a curve, and a curve is sensual; and a woman’s face, more often than not, wears a soft look, and that is sensual too. Forcing his vague impulses and impressions into a kind of unity, Roman fixed his mind on Sallou.