I looked around at the Romeo Company seniors and tried to relate the proud faces to the shivering, aghast initiates who had endured Hell Night on the fouth battalion quadrangle over three years before. We looked older and more matue, but we also looked the same. However, the difference was enormous and aprt of the bizarre and glorious alchemy that made us love the Institute more than anything we ahd ever loved before. That was the single most sublime and untranslatable mystery of the school. And I felt the immense weight and actuality of that mystery as I studied the small black box that was before me. Inside that box was an Institute ring. But this ring was different from all the other rings ever made. Engraved in a feathery script on the inside shank was the name: Will McLean. Here, at last, was the symbol, the absolute proof, that I was part of all this, that I had earned the right to love the school, and to criticize it (264).
I had come to Charleston as a young boy, a lonely visitor slouching through its well-tended streets, a young boy, lean and grassy, who grew fluent in his devotion and appreciation of that city's inestimable charm. I was a boy there and saw things through the eyes of a boy for the last time. The boy was dying and I wanted to leave him in the silent lanes South of Broad. I would leave him with no regrets except that I had not stopped to honor his passing. I had not thanked the boy for his capacity for astonishment, for curiosity, and for survival. I was indebted to that boy. I owed him my respect and my thanks. I owed him my remembrance of the lessons he learned so keenly and so ominously. He had issued me a challenge and he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courgage to become a gentle, harmless man. For so long, I had felt like the last boy in America and now, at last, it was to leave him. Now it was the man. The man was the quest (496).
