With delight he imagined himself as dying and with his
last breath tossing a round oath into the air of his death chamber.
In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes. He
kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint of
life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and
following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at a
girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the
next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John
Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, "June's twice June
since she breathed it with me."
And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive. Already
he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the ankles of
women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd about the
stove in Wildman's fell to telling smutty stories. He sank to unbelievable
depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into dictionaries for
words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly perverted mind and,
when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of the old Bible tale of
Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and woman that it brought
to him.
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