The boy was adolescent, sentimental, and lonely. Mere human companionship, such as that which Honey gave him, was no longer enough for him. He was seeing visions and dreaming dreams. He began to wish he had some one with whom to share his unformulated hopes, his crude and burning opinions. He looked at fellows who were friends going two and two, pouring out their foolish young hearts to each other, and envied them. The lads of his own age liked him well enough. Now and then one of them would approach him with shy or awkward signals, making for closer acquaintance; but when they learned that he lived in Grove Street with a stevedore they drew away. None of them ever transcended the law of caste, to stand by him in spite of his humble conditions. Boys whose families were down wanted nothing to hamper them in climbing up. Boys whose families were up wanted nothing that might loosen their position and pull them down. The sense of social insecurity which was the atmosphere of homes reacted on well-meaning striplings of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, turning them into snobs and cads before they had outgrown callowness.
But during the winter of the year in which he became sixteen there were two, you might have said three, who broke in upon this solitude.
[Pg 190]
In walking to the Latin School from Grove Street he was in the habit of going through Louisburg Square. If you know Boston you know Louisburg Square as that quaint red-brick rectangle, like many in the more Georgian parts of London, which commemorates the gallant dash of the New England colonists on the French fortress of Louisburg in Cape Breton. It is the heart of that conservative old Boston, which is now shrinking in size and importance before the onset of the foreigner till it has become like a small beleaguered citadel. Here the descendants of the Puritans barricade themselves behind their financial walls, as their ancestors within their stockades, while their city is handed over to the Irishman and the Italian as an undefended town. The Boston of tradition is a Boston of tradition only. Like the survivors of Noah's deluge clinging to the top of a rock, they to whom the Boston of tradition was bequeathed are driven back on Beacon Hill as a final refuge from the billows rising round them. A high-bred, cultivated, sympathetic people, they have so given away their heritage as to be but a negligible factor in the State, in the country, of which their fathers and grandfathers may be said once to have kept the conscience.
But to Tom Whitelaw Louisburg Square meant only the dignified fronts and portals behind which lived the rich people who had no point of contact with himself. They couldn't have ignored him more completely than he ignored them. He thought of them as little as the lion cub in a circus parade thinks of the people of the city through which he passes in proces
[Pg 191]
sions. Then, one day, one of these strangers spoke to him.
It was a youth of about his own age. More than once, as Tom went by, and the stout boy stood on the sidewalk in front of his own house, they had looked each other up and down with unabashed mutual appraisal. Tom saw a lad too short for his width, and unhealthily flabby. He had puffy hands, and puffy cheeks, with eyes seeming smaller than they were because the puffy eyelids covered them. The mouth had those appealing curves comically troubled in repose, but fulfilling their purpose in giggling. On the first occasion when Tom passed by the lips were set to the serious task of inspection. They said nothing; they betrayed nothing. Tom himself thought nothing, except that the boy was fat.
They had looked at each other some two or three times a week, for perhaps a month, when one day the fat boy said, "Hullo!" Tom also said, "Hullo!" continuing on his way. A day or two later they repeated these salutations, though neither forsook his attitude of reserve. The fat boy did this first, speaking when they had hullo'ed each other for the third or fourth time. His voice was high and girlish, and yet with a male crack in it.
"What school do you go to?"
Tom stopped. "I go to the Latin School. What school do you go to?"
"I go to Doolittle and Pray's."
"That's the big private school in Marlborough Street, isn't it?"
The fat boy made the inarticulate grunt which with
[Pg 192]
 most Americans means "Yes." "I was put down for Groton, only mother wouldn't let me leave home. I'm going to Harvard."
"I'm going to Harvard, too. What class do you expect to be in?"
The fat boy replied that he expected to be in the class of nineteen-nineteen.
Tom said he expected to be in that class himself.
"Now I've got to beat it to the Latin School. So long!"
"So long!"
Tom carried to his school in the Fenway an unusual feeling of elation. With friendly intent someone had approached him from the world outside. It was not the first time it had ever happened, but it was the first time it had ever happened in just this way. He could see already that the fat boy was not one of those he would have chosen for a friend; but he was so lonely that he welcomed anyone. Moreover, he divined that the fat boy was lonely, too. Boys of that type, the Miss Nancy and the mother's darling type, were often consumed by loneliness, and no one ever pitied them. Few went to their aid when other boys "picked" on them, but of those few Tom Whitelaw was always one. He found them, once you had accepted their mannerisms, as well worth knowing as other boys, while they spared him a scrap of admiration. It was possible that in this fat boy he might find the long-sought fellow who would not "turn him down" on discovering that he lived in Grove Street. Being turned down in this way had made him sick at heart so often that he had decided never any more to
[Pg 193]
 make or trust advances. In suffering temptation again he assured himself that it would be for the last time in his life.
On returning from school he looked for the boy in Louisburg Square, but he was not there. A few hundred yards farther, however, he came in for another adventure.
The January morning had been mild, with melting snow. By midday the wind had shifted to the north, with a falling thermometer. By late afternoon the streets were coated with a glaze of ice. Tom could swagger down the slope of Grove Street easily enough in the security of rubber soles.
But not so a girl, whose slippers and high French heels made her helpless on the steep glare. Having ventured over the brow of the hill, she found herself held. A step into the air would have been as easy as another on this slippery descent. Th............