I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations. The life there
was healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was too
late. I was not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. I
had bucked big with men. I knew mysterious and violent things. I
was from the other side of life so far as concerned the young men
I encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I spoke another language, possessed
a sadder and more terrible wisdom. (When I come to think it over,
I realise now that I have never had a boyhood.) At any rate, the
Y.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me, too unsophisticated.
This I would not have minded, could they have met me and helped me
mentally. But I had got more out of the books than they. Their
meagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectual
experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced
their wholesome morality and healthful sports.

In short, I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade. All
the clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--
thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too
much too young. And yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is
eliminated from the needs and the institutions of men, it will be
the Y.M.C.A., and similar unthinkably better and wiser and more
virile congregating-places, that will receive the men who now go
to saloons to find themselves and one another. In the meantime,
we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss to-day, here and now.

I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drum
machine toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other
ways than at a machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had
my fill of saloons. I wanted something new. I was growing up. I
was developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities.