He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought
they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
"I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell
her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.
And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.
"It cleanses me! this cleanses me!" he said to himself.
He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman's grocery
when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from
the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely
perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been. "Sex is a
solution, not a menace--it is wonderful," he told himself without knowing
fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.
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