"Yes, I'm that kind of fellow."
This was mere marking time. The decision was still to come. It came with an air on the fat boy's part of heroic resolution.
"Well, I don't care."
Tom breathed again, breathed with bravado. "Neither do I."
In the stress of so much big-heartedness the girlish voice became a croak. "I know guys who think that if another guy isn't rich they must treat him as so much dirt. I'm not that sort. I'm democratic. I wouldn't turn down a fellow just because he lived in Grove Street. If I liked him I'd stick to him. I'm not snobbish. How do you know you couldn't give him a peg up, and he'd be grateful to you all his life?"
Thinking this over afterward, Tom found it hard to disengage the bitter from the sweet; but he had not much chance to think it over. Any spare minute he found pre-empted by Maisie Danker, who seemed to camp in the dark hallway. If she was not there when he entered, she appeared before he could go upstairs. The ice having melted in the street, she had other needs of protection, an errand to do in the crowded region of Bowdoin Square, a shop to visit across the Common which was so wide and lonesome in winter twilights, a dance hall to locate in case they ever made up their minds to visit it. She was always timid, clinging, laughing, adorable. The embodiment of gayety, she made him gay, which was again a new sensation. Never before had he felt young as he felt young with her. The minutes they spent swamped in the throngs of the lighted streets, between five and seven on a winter's afternoon, were his first minutes of escape from a world of care. Care had been his companion since he could remember anything; and now his companion was this exquisite thing, all lightsomeness and joy.
He was later than usual in returning from school one afternoon, because a teacher had given him a commission to carry out which took some two hours of his time. As it had sent him toward the south end of the city, he had the Common to traverse on his way home. Snow had recently fallen; but through the main avenues under the trees the paths had been cleared. On the Frog Pond the drifts had been swept up, so that there could be a little skating. As Tom passed by he could hear the scraping and grinding of skates, and the hoarse shouts of hobbledehoys. At any other time he would have stopped, either to look on peacefully, or to take part in some bit of free-for-all, rough-and-tumble skylarking in the snow. But Maisie might be waiting. She might even have given up waiting, which would take all his pleasure from the afternoon.
To reach home more quickly he followed a short cut, scarcely shoveled out, on the slope of the Common below Beacon Hill. Here there were no foot passengers but himself. Neither, for some little distance, were there any trees. There was only the white shroud of the snow, freezing to a crust. A misty moon drifted through a tempest of scudding clouds, while wherever in the offing there was a group of elms the electric lights danced through their tossing branches as if they were wind-blown lanterns.