Although he had not heard any of the stranger’s preliminary discourse, and shrank from making inquiries, Rube’s interest was aroused to the highest pitch. He returned to his home with the few words he had heard seething and bubbling in his mind. For he felt that at last here was a way of escape from the almost insupportable deadness of his life. He could not realise that ‘the mind is its own place,’ and so, like a caged animal, seeing a door of hope open to him, he felt an unconquerable longing to flee. He said not a word throughout the evening meal, but that was so much his habit now that it passed unnoticed. Mechanically he bowed his head at ‘worship,’ but his father’s reading of a chapter from the Bible might have been in the original Hebrew for all he understood of it. After gaining the solitude of his room, he sat on the bed, his head on his hands, trying hard to reduce the whirlpool of his thoughts to some definite shape until far into the night, but in vain. Only one idea seemed to stand out sharply and distinctly against the misty tumult: he must _go_. At last, wearied with mental conflict, he fell backward, dressed as he was, and went to sleep.
He rose unrefreshed, with a racking headache for the first time in his life, and went about his usual round of duties automatically. But his face bore such evident traces of his last night’s conflict that they could not escape his mother’s keen eye. She anxiously inquired after his health, but was met with the careless reply that he was ‘all right.’ She knew better, of course, but it had never been her way to force confidence, and so she manifested no more curiosity. She only looked wistfully at her boy when unobserved by him, and hovered about him as if more than ordinarily solicitous for his comfort. All day long he moved and looked like a man in a dream, every thought, every feeling merged in one idea--escape. Strange, that it never occurred to him how impossible it is for a man to flee from himself.
Without waiting for supper, and as if dreading to be questioned, no sooner was the day’s work done than he strode off to the village grocery, assuming, as he approached it, a most elaborate air of unconcern, and lounging into the midst of the little knot of listless men hanging about the door as if nothing mattered--an attitude common to all of them. He had not long to wait. In about ten minutes after his arrival a brisk footfall was heard, and turning the corner sharply the lean, keen-looking stranger of the previous evening strode into the midst of the group.