The Call of the Cumberlands

Early that year, the touch of autumn came to the air. Often, returning

at sundown from the afternoon life class, Samson felt the lure of its

melancholy sweetness, and paused on one of the Washington Square

benches, with many vague things stirring in his mind. Some of these

things were as subtly intangible as the lazy sweetness that melted the

façades of the walls into the soft colors of a dream city. He found

himself loving the Palisades of Jersey, seen through a powdery glow at

evening, and the red-gold glare of the setting sun on high-swung gilt

signs.

He felt with a throb of his pulses that he was in the Bagdad of

the new world, and that every skyscraper was a minaret from which the

muezzin rang toward the Mecca of his Art. He felt with a stronger throb

the surety of young, but quickening, abilities within himself. Partly,

it was the charm of Indian summer, partly a sense of growing with the

days, but, also, though he had not as yet realized that, it was the new

friendship into which Adrienne had admitted him, and the new experience

of frank camaraderie with a woman not as a member of an inferior

sex, but as an equal companion of brain and soul. He had seen her

often, and usually alone, because he shunned meetings with strangers.

Until his education had advanced further, he wished to avoid social

embarrassments. He knew that she liked him, and realized that it was

because he was a new and virile type, and for that reason a diversion

--a sort of human novelty. She liked him, too, because it was rare for a

man to offer her friendship without making love, and she was certain he

would not make love. He liked her for the same many reasons that every

one else did--because she was herself. Of late, too, he had met a

number of men at Lescott's clubs. He was modestly surprised to find

that, though his attitude on these occasions was always that of one

sitting in the background, the men seemed to like him, and, when they

said, "See you again," at parting, it was with the convincing manner of

real friendliness. Sometimes, even now, his language was ungrammatical,

but so, for the matter of that, was theirs.... The great writer smiled

with his slow, humorous lighting of the eyes as he observed to Lescott: "We are licking our cub into shape, George, and the best of it is

that, when he learns to dance ragtime to the organ, he isn't going to

stop being a bear. He's a grizzly!"