David wiped his hands on his trouser seat. Tom laughed.
“I don’t understand,” said David. Then he blushed.
They walked in silence. David found that walking so in silence beside this man he could think: his mind took form: he felt he could direct it. He said to himself: “I must think ... about the city.... That is important. I am going there soon. I don’t know what to think.... What do I know?”
He said aloud: “What was it you said you understood?”
“How you feel—a little.”
“Why?”
“I also came to New York, a first time—once.”
“Tell me about it,” said David....
A faint trail lagged over root and moss through trees to a grove of locusts—a wide clearing with splotches of gold on blue grass. A girl stood before a tree-stump. It was round and quite smoothly cut. On it, at the height of her waist, was a clay model—reddish rich clay—and the crude hint coming out of a mother with a child.
The girl was plain and angular. She wore a drab brown smock. Her coarse skirt was high above mannish boots. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbows and the muscles of her thin arms were eager and tense. She stopped and wiped the stray brown hair from her eyes, looking at her work. A twig snapped: instinctively she fended her arm over the clay figure: she turned. Tom Rennard was there.