To this healthy but unhappy product of English ancestry, Methodist theology, and the American public school system the tumult of the outer world meant little compared to the tumult within his brain.
Now, striding along Main Street in greasy coveralls, glowering at the Saturday afternoon sun through eyes dark with anger, kicking defiantly through drifts of yellow elm leaves, flaunting rebellion and stubborn pride at every step, he was just a kid coming home from work at the "Trailer" to those he met; but to himself, Peter was quite naturally the center of the Universe.
He would show the world and particularly Mike O'Casey and the front office gang what sort of a boy they had greasing their trailers. He would invent some new and world-revolutionizing trailer which would make them pop-eyed with amazement. And when he had been made vice-president of the company he would call Bud Spillman into his office and dismiss him with great dignity.
Peter told himself that he was talking nonsense and acting like an unbroken yearling. He knew that he should be the happiest boy in the world and should thank God for his good fortune. Nevertheless as he elbowed his way through clots of gossiping farmers whose rigs and Fords lined Main Street he knew that he was far from being happy.
Maybe life in town wasn't so perfect after all. Perhaps after he had taken a crack at this trailer job.... But no. He would never go back to the farm. Not even if he could be thrashing boss every year with twenty men under him. He would stick it out greasing trailers until the day he died. Bud Spillman or anyone else couldn't whip Peter Brailsford.
He stopped before the Bentley Brothers' Hardware store, irrepressibly drawn by the beautiful stag and pearl-handled jack-knives in the window, and remembered the jack-knife he had stolen from a boy at country school and how he had known that God had seen him steal the knife, and how for days he went in constant dread that God would strike him dead for his sin. He still had an overwhelming desire for pearl-handled jack-knives. He remembered how he had thought that eternal damnation was not too great a price to pay for that shining knife, which was as cool and smooth as slippery elm between his fingers.
Looking in at the hardware store window cluttered with milk pails, muskrat traps, fish poles, pitchforks and spades he suddenly caught sight of his own offensive image in the glass: ears that stuck out on either side of his head like sails, a thatch of dark, unruly curls which would never stay combed, big brown calf's eyes which might have graced a Jersey heifer, and pouting lips.
He wondered how anyone could look so ugly. "What you need," he said irrelevantly, "is a good swift kick in the pants." Undoubtedly, with a face like that, he was getting more than he deserved from a most generous world.
He began to count his blessings, unconvinced but hopeful. He was away from the farm at last, had freedom, a job, and a room in town. His third weekly paycheck of twenty-two dollars and fifty cents was in his pocket. He had a girl who some day might give him a kiss, and a dapper little employer, Mike O'Casey, whom he admired beyond all power of expression.
Still he was miserable.