“I am so glad to see you!” Cornelia had him at once in hand. He looked very tall beside her sharp slightness. She took his hat and his coat.
“Do sit down.” David was anxious to look everywhere about him, to touch all these mysteries with the warmth of his eyes so that they might be cold and strange no longer. He did not quite dare. He kept looking near Cornelia: then, with still greater ease, toward Tom. In this his sensitivity was clear. A glance was an intimate gesture, a visit, to David. He could not comfortably look at what he did not already comfortably know.
“Tom has told me not half enough about you. Just enough,” she smiled, “to make me know it was not half enough.”
Tom apprehensively tested his new friend. His gladness at seeing David understand Cornelia released his worry into laughter.
“Oh,” said David, “it is just the same in my case with what Mr. Rennard has said about you.” He looked at the little cast between the windows and blushed: he folded his hands and looked at them.
Tom remained silent. There was no need of talking: and although he talked much it was deeply true that Tom talked only when he had need of talking. He was comfortable now. He lit a cigarette, and lay prone, propped by his arms, on the window-seat; he let the conversation of the two go over him and smoked.
“You know,” Cornelia said, “we are not New Yorkers either.”
David met her eyes. “Your brother told me about how you ran away.”
Cornelia was silent. What could she say to swell the room’s slow freedom?
“My case”—David went on—“I am so different. I always lived with my mother and then she died. And then my uncle took me—took me really in charge. That is why I came. I have never done anything because I wanted to, really—that I can remember. Except perhaps work in the bicycle shop. Mother wanted me to stay longer at school. But—” he looked at his hands again and stopped, then met Cornelia squarely with a smile, “the truth is mother said to me: ‘Do as you please, son.’ And—and I was bored by school. My best friend, Jay Leamy—he worked at Mr. Devitt’s also.”