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!"