A Separate Peace Read Free Page B

to happen. It’s all a question of birthdays, unless you want to be more specific and look at it from the sexual point of view, which I have never cared to do myself, since it’s a question of my mother and my father, and I have never felt I wanted to think about their sexual lives too much.” Everything he said was true and sincere; Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this stunned people then he was surprised.
    Mr. Prud’homme released his breath with a sort of amazed laugh, stared at Finny for a while, and that was all there was to it.
    This was the way the Masters tended to treat us that summer. They seemed to be modifying their usual attitude of floating, chronic disapproval. During the winter most of them regarded anything unexpected in a student with suspicion, seeming to feel that anything we said or did was potentially illegal. Now on these clear June days in New Hampshire they appeared to uncoil, they seemed to believe that we were with them about half the time, and only spent the other half trying to make fools of them. A streak of tolerance was detectable; Finny decided that they were beginning to show commendable signs of maturity.
    It was partly his doing. The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant’s corner. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.
    But there was another reason. I think we remindedthem of what peace was like, we boys of sixteen. We were registered with no draft board, we had taken no physical examinations. No one had ever tested us for hernia or color blindness. Trick knees and punctured eardrums were minor complaints and not yet disabilities which would separate a few from the fate of the rest. We were careless and wild, and I suppose we could be thought of as a sign of the life the war was being fought to preserve. Anyway, they were more indulgent toward us than at any other time; they snapped at the heels of the seniors, driving and molding and arming them for the war. They noticed our games tolerantly. We reminded them of what peace was like, of lives which were not bound up with destruction.
    Phineas was the essence of this careless peace. Not that he was unconcerned about the war. After Mr. Prud’homme left he began to dress, that is he began reaching for whatever clothes were nearest, some of them mine. Then he stopped to consider, and went over to the dresser. Out of one of the drawers he lifted a finely woven broadcloth shirt, carefully cut, and very pink.
    â€œWhat’s that thing?”
    â€œThis is a tablecloth,” he said out of the side of his mouth.
    â€œNo, cut it out. What is it?”
    â€œThis,” he then answered with some pride, “is going to be my emblem. Ma sent it up last week. Did you ever see stuff like this, and a color like this? It doesn’t even button all the way down. You have to pull it over your head, like this.”
    â€œOver your head? Pink! It makes you look like a fairy! ”
    â€œDoes it?” He used this preoccupied tone when he was thinking of something more interesting than what you hadsaid. But his mind always recorded what was said and played it back to him when there was time, so as he was buttoning the high collar in front of the mirror he said mildly, “I wonder what would happen if I looked like a fairy to everyone.”
    â€œYou’re nuts.”
    â€œWell, in case suitors begin clamoring at the door, you can tell them I’m wearing this as an emblem.” He turned around to let me admire it. “I was reading in the paper that we bombed Central Europe for the first time the other day.” Only someone who knew Phineas as well as I did could realize that he was not