all this work, and from now on would only go rackingly through the motions. My knees were
boneless again, ready any minute to let my lower legs telescope up into the thighs. My head felt
as though different sections of the cranium were grinding into each other.
Then, for no reason at all, I felt magnificent. It was as though my body until that instant had
simply been lazy, as though the aches and exhaustion were all imagined, created from nothing in
order to keep me from truly exerting myself. Now my body seemed at last to say, “Well, if you
must have it, here!” and an accession of strength came flooding through me. Buoyed up, I forgot
my usual feeling of routine self-pity when working out, I lost myself, oppressed mind along with
aching body; all entanglements were shed, I broke into the clear.
After the fourth circuit, like sitting in a chair, I pulled up in front of Phineas.
“You’re not even winded,” he said.
“I know.”
“You found your rhythm, didn’t you, that third time around. Just as you came into that straight
part there.”
“Yes, right there.”
“You’ve been pretty lazy all along, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I guess I have been.”
“You didn’t even know anything about yourself.”
“I don’t guess I did, in a way.”
“Well,” he gathered the sheepskin collar around his throat, “now you know. And stop talking like
a Georgia cracker—’don’t guess I did’!” Despite this gibe he was rather impersonal toward me.
He seemed older that morning, and leaning quietly against that great tree wrapped in his heavy
coat, he seemed smaller too. Or perhaps it was only that I, inside the same body, had felt myself
all at once grown bigger.
We proceeded slowly back to the dormitory. On the steps going in we met Mr. Ludsbury coming
out.
“I’ve been watching you from my window,” he said in his hooting voice with a rare trace of
personal interest. “What are you up to, Forrester, training for the Commandos?” There was no
rule explicitly forbidding exercise at such an hour, but it was not expected; ordinarily therefore
Mr. Ludsbury would have disapproved. But the war had modified even his standards; all forms
of physical exercise had become conventional for the Duration.
I mumbled some abashed answer, but it was Phineas who made the clear response.