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20 eternal life seemed to fuse itself with the long and empty summer afternoon. The tedium vitæ got transmuted into the colossal ennui of heaven. Not as a pearly municipality of golden streets and white-robed choirs did Gilbert imagine heaven, but always in the guise of those white clouds on which God rode. He saw himself clearly, seated infinitely high above the earth, to which he should never be able to come again. Perhaps there was the intimation of a harp, but what seized Gilbert's imagination was the vast emptiness of the space around him, the disorientation of everything. Time and space were no longer fluid and mobile, but frozen; and in the hot, sticky afternoon, his slightly feverish body, all alert and sensitive at every pore of time that dripped past him, would be terribly conscious of this horror that awaited him, of this immobile time in empty space. It was not the dark or stillness that he feared. On the contrary, he saw this future state as floating in the clearest, most luminous light. On certain days, when he happened to look at the sky, he would see just that pale infinite blue into which you could look on and on and never reach the end. When it was really blue or cloudy, it curved comfortingly over you, near and definite like a bowl. But when it was of a certain paleness, the bowl seemed to have been removed and you looked through, out into nothingness. And if in this nothingness there were white majestic clouds floating, that looked solid as if they could bear you away, then over Gilbert would sweep again this ennui of heaven, lost and forgotten perhaps since that last afternoon in the darkened parlor. And a vague feeling of homelessness and of fear would fall upon him. His play would flag until the clouds drifted away again and he forgot that they had come.

The first break in Gilbert's world came when his mother decided that he and Olga ought to go to school. Gilbert was seven years old, and when his mother told him rather worriedly about it, he felt at first rather pleased at the idea of something so important. What would they teach him? Mother said Miss Waldron would teach him. He knew how to read and write and he could spell all the words he wrote. He read all the books he was given and sometimes looked into Hawthorne's Wonder Tales, and read a page or two. When he went back for the book, however, he would forget where he had left off. So he would read a page anywhere. What did it matter? He read his Bible in the same haphazard way. He knew