He had fallen in love with Greenwich Village from the first day he had explored it for a promising dwelling-place. Here, he knew, lived Sally Heffer, and here doubtless he would meet her and she would help shape his fight, perhaps be the woman to gird on his armor, put sword in his hand, and send him forth. For he needed her, needed her as a child needs a teacher, as a recruit needs a disciplined veteran. It was she who had first revealed the actual world to him; it was she who had first divined his power and his purpose; it was she who had released him from guilt by showing him a means of expiation.
And yet, withal, he feared to meet her. There had been something terrible about her that afternoon at Carnegie Hall, and something that awed him that evening at the Woman's League. Until she had broken down and wept, she had hardly seemed a woman--rather a voice crying in the wilderness, a female Isaiah, the toilers become articulate. And he could not think of her as a simple, vivacious young woman. How would she greet him? Would her eyes remember his part in the fire?
At least, so he told himself, he would not seek her out (he had her address from Fannie Lemick) until he had something to show for his new life--until, possibly, he had a copy of that magazine which was still a hypothesis and a chimera. Then he would nerve himself and go to her and she should judge him as she pleased.
That first supper with his mother had a sweetness new to their lives. He ran out to the butcher, the grocer, and the delicatessen man, and came home laden with packages. The stove in the rear kitchen was set alight; the wooden table in the center was spread with cloth and cutlery; and they sat down opposite each other, utterly alone ... no boarding--house flutter and gossip and noise, no unpleasant jarring personalities, no wholesale cookery. All was quiet and peace--a brooding, tinkling silence. They both smiled and smiled, their eyes moist, and the food tasted so good. Blessed bread that they broke together, the cup that they shared between them! The moment became sacred, human, stirred by all the old, old miraculousness of home, that deepest need of humanity, that rich relationship that cuts so much deeper than the light touch-and-go of the world.