His sharpness seemed right for the city. This man was a city man. David did not think there could be dim things—dim lights—ever in New York. Yet that picture he had of the law-school.
“—an ideal setting, don’t you think?” Tom said, “for learning the law?”
David walked with the picture of Mr. Devitt’s shop. He loved it.... A long low dirty room behind the bike-store. He went in. It smelt of leather and glue and oil, of rubber and sweat. That smell left him. A gas jet burned in the piping that cut down crooked from the crumbled plaster. The dim noise of the place seemed almost to stop his pores. He looked at the gray refuse through the dirty window and did not like where he was. He went to work. His hands worked. His mind took on a leisurely gait with the room, took along with it the way of his hands. He liked where he was. His mind and his hands were clear of the room, moving with it. It was fun. When he tired, he stopped.... A city man. He was going to the city. A city man had looked at him and known he was going to the city!
“I wonder—will I ever be a New Yorker.”
Tom Rennard laughed. “Soon enough. Too soon.”
“I was born in Boston!”
Tom looked at him: “You are not like Boston,” he said. “—old Boston, perhaps:—a Boston that was really a field compressed, a gathering place of fields and of field-folks: a Boston I dream of—where Thoreau came.”
Still David was elate, not understanding. His legs and his arms were very free. He felt, walking beside this clear quick man, a cloudiness about himself. He had a distant sense of a David Markand: his legs exhaled a smell of rubber and grease, his shoulders pushed along like a slow hill rising to the horizon, his head moved faintly like a tree. If this distant sense came nearer he would laugh. He felt he was not a city man, even though he was born in Boston. He stopped. He stooped and pulled a clump of dripping moss with his two hands. He threw it away. He turned his muddy palms toward Tom.
“Look,” he said.
“Yes—I understand.”