Again a hungry desire to enter into the lives of the people about him
took possession of the Missourian. To be a young man dressed in a stiff
white collar, wearing neatly made clothes, and in the evening to walk about
with young girls seemed like getting on the road to happiness. He wanted
to run shouting along the path beside the road until he had overtaken the
young man and woman, to beg them to take him with them, to accept him
as one of themselves, but when the momentary impulse had passed and he
returned to the telegraph office and lighted a lamp, he looked at his
long awkward body and could not conceive of himself as ever by any chance
becoming the thing he wanted to be. Sadness swept over him and his gaunt
face, already cut and marked with deep lines, became longer and more
gaunt. The old boyhood notion, put into his mind by the words of his
foster-mother, Sarah Shepard, that a town and a people could remake him and
erase from his body the marks of what he thought of as his inferior birth,
began to fade. He tried to forget the people about him and turned with
renewed energy to the study of the problems in the books that now lay in
a pile upon his desk. His inclination to dreams, balked by the persistent
holding of his mind to definite things, began to reassert itself in a new
form, and his brain played no more with pictures of clouds and men in
agitated movement but took hold of steel, wood, and iron.
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