He was alive, painfully alive, to the great universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should study Latin.
"What in hell has Latin to do with it ?" he demanded before his mirror that night.

"I wish dead people would stay dead.

Why should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead?
Beauty is alive and everlasting.
Languages come and go.

They are the dust of the dead." And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very well, and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar fashion when he was with Ruth.

He was only a schoolboy, with a schoolboy's tongue, when he was in her presence.
"Give me time," he said aloud.