passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered
and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.

Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a
drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the
next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their
keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the
station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in
groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, "It is the
loutish age."

If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat
musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with
the Walker girl. He remembered his sister's affair with a young farmer and
shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the
man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields
stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer's speech. So
vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which
men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of
pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed
the sense of Telfer's talk, thought that all society had resolved itself
into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to
make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him
seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what
was in his mind.