My discovery of my body, and my books, held me in equal bondage.  I neglected my work in the drying room.  My father was vexed.  He’d hunt me out of the obscure corners back of the hanging sheets of composite where I hid, absorbed in myself and the book I held, and would run me back to work.

* * * * *

One day, in the factory, two other boys on an errand from another department, came back where I sat, in a hidden nook, reading Thompson’s Seasons.  One of them spit over my shoulder, between the leaves.  I leaped to my feet, infuriated, and a fight began.  The desecration of my beloved poetry gave me such angry strength that I struck out lustily and dropped both of them....

Rushing in on the uproar and blaming me for it, my father seized me by the collar.  He booted the other boys off, who were by this time on their feet again, took me up into the water-tower, and beat me with one of the heavy sticks, with metal clips on it, that was used for hanging the composite on.

Still trembling with the fight, I shook with a superadded ague of fear.  My father’s chastisement brought back to me with a chill the remembrance of the beatings Uncle Landon had given me.

* * * * *

“By God, Johnnie, this is the only thing there’s left to do with you.”  He flung me aside.  I lay there sobbing.

“Tell me, my boy, what is the matter with you?” he asked, softening.  Unlike Landon, he was usually gentle with me.  He seldom treated me harshly.

“Father, I don’t want to work any more.”

“Don’t want to work?... but you quit school just to go to work, at your own wish!”

“I want to go back to school!”

“Back to school?... you’ll be behind the rest by now.”

“I’ve been studying a lot by myself,” I replied, forgetting the feel of the stick already and absorbed in the new idea.

By this time we were down the stairs again, and I was sitting by my father’s desk.  He took up the unlighted cigar he always carried in his mouth (for smoking was not allowed among such inflammable material as composite).  He sucked at it thoughtfully from habit, as if he were smoking.

“Look here, my son, what is the matter with you ... won’t you tell your daddy?”

“Nothing’s the matter with me, Pop!”

“You’re getting thin as a shadow ... are you feeling sick?”

“No, Pop!”

“You’re a queer little duck.”

There was a long silence.

“You’re always reading ... good books too ... yet you’re no more good in school than you are at work ...  I can’t make you out, by the living God, I can’t ... what is it you want to be?”

“I don’t know, only I want to go back to school again.”

“But what did you leave for?”

“I hated arithmetic.”

“What do you want to study, then?”