Midstream Author:Will Levington Comfort Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 3 BODY I WAS not a question-asker. ... A boy of one of the houses across was my earliest initiator into the how and what of our making. I was about seven and ... more »not large; he was no larger, but three years older. There was a nasty perversion upon all that came to me from and through him. His age was a fierce attraction to me, and he had the face of an innocent. His was a big brick house like mine, and much was in it—an attic of attractions, lower rooms seldom used, a Poiish serving-maid of fifteen' or sixteen, as interested as ourselves in sensation. There were a few long summer afternoons in that house. The serving-maid, as I recall, was not evil; she was merely common, her nature adjusted to low animal vibration. The boy was evil, precociously so. I, too, was precociously evil, but with a difference which I did not know then, but which life has proved to me—different in the possession of an automatic corrective tendency. If I should happen upon two small boys and an older girl in the midst of such engagements now, the first shock woiald contain the sense of their hopelessness. This comes of the readjustments of the years, in the process of which hazy curtains are hung, one after another, between us and the past. The more powerfully we mature, the more concentrated is our gaze ahead; and yet, we must reach in our progress that intensity of wisdom which penetrates the veils of the background with the same power that discerns through the shine, the configuration of the upland. We must know ourselves, and cease lying to ourselves, in order to deal with children, in whom are animals as well as angels. I knew the deadly poison of those afternoon hours in that old house. At the time I thought the other boy did, too, and must be fighting with himself, even though he made the...« less