Rising with tireless grace.
Rising above your cart
Of apples, figs, and plums,
And with its swelling art
Deriding the city’s drums.
With a quivering immersion he bent over his paper, lost to the keen realities of a city day. Sidling vagrants and transients from small towns glanced at him with morose disfavor and sometimes stopped to stare at this shabby young man whose head was never raised from his writing. His abstraction was an insult to their sense of idle release. He wrote for hours and only paused when hunger of a different kind began irresistibly to whisper within him, for he had not eaten since morning. It was six o’clock when he hastened from the park. He joined the homeward bound masses, feeling satiated and apart, and dreading the evening contact with his sagging, verbose parents. They were sitting and standing in two of the few postures that life still absentmindedly allowed them—bending over newspaper and frying-pan.
“Well, I’ve lost my job,” he said to his father.
His father dropped the newspaper and his mother shuffled in from the kitchen.
“Lost your job—what do you mean?” said his mother with slow incredulity, as though she had just escaped being crushed by a falling wall.
“They told me this morning that it had only been a temporary one and they paid me off. I thanked the clerk for his news but he didn’t seem to take it in the right spirit.”