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Evelyn. It was not even like it, except in degree. But because he could now feel to such a degree, he was aware of his loss, and he did just what he had done when first he lost it. He cried.
       It was the same shrill tortured weeping that had led Prodd to him in the darkening wood a year ago. This room was too small to contain it. Mrs Prodd had never heard him make a sound before. Prodd had, that first night. It would be hard to say whether it was worse to listen to such a sound or to listen to it again.
       Mrs Prodd put her arms around his head and cooed small syllables to him. Prodd balanced himself awkwardly near by, put out a hand, changed his mind, and finally retreated into a futile reiteration: “Aw. Aw... Aw, now.”
       In its own time, the weeping stopped. Sniffling, he looked at them each in turn. Something new was in his face; it was as if the bronze mask over which his facial skin was stretched had disappeared. “I’m sorry,” Prodd said. “Reckon we did something wrong.”
       “It wasn’t wrong,” said his wife. “You’ll see.”
    He got a name.
       The night he cried, he discovered consciously that if he wished, he could absorb a message, a meaning, from those about him. It had happened before, but it happened as the wind happened to blow on him, as reflexively as a sneeze or a shiver. He began to hold and turn this ability, as once he had held and turned the ball of yarn. The sounds called speech still meant little to him, but he began to detect the difference between speech directed to him and that which did not concern him. He never really learned to hear speech; instead, ideas were transmitted to him directly. Ideas in themselves are formless, and it is hardly surprising that he learned very slowly to give ideas the form of speech.
       “What’s your name?” Prodd asked him suddenly one day. They were filling the horse trough from the cistern and there was that about water running and running in the sun which tugged deeply at the idiot. Utterly absorbed, he was jolted by the question. He looked up and found his gaze locked with Prodd’s.
       Name . He made a reaching, a flash of demand, and it returned to him carrying what might be called a definition. It came, though, as pure concept. “ Name” is the single thing which is me and what I have done and been and learned .
       It was all there, waiting for that single symbol, a name. All the wandering, the hunger, the loss, the thing which is worse than loss, called lack. There was a dim and subtle awareness that even here, with the Prodds, he was not a something, but a substitute for something.
       All alone .
       He tried to say it. Directly from Prodd he took the concept and its verbal coding and the way it ought to sound. But understanding and expressing were one thing; the physical act of enunciation was something else again. His tongue might have been a shoe sole and his larynx a rusty whistle. His lips writhed. He said, “Ul... ul...”
       “What is it, son?”
       All alone . It was transmitted clear and clean, complete, but as a thought only, and he sensed instantly that a thought sent this way had no impact whatever on Prodd, though the farmer strained to receive what he was trying to convey. “Ul-ul... lone,” he gasped.
       “Lone?” said Prodd.
       It could be seen that the syllable meant something to Prodd, something like the codification he offered, though far less.
       But it would do.
       He tried to repeat the sound, but his unaccustomed tongue became spastic. Saliva spurted annoyingly and ran from his lips. He sent a desperate demand for help, for some other way to express it, found it, used it. He nodded.
       “Lone,” repeated Prodd.
       And again he nodded; and this was his first word and his first conversation; another miracle.
       It took him