“A bit of a loaf before you buckle down?” “He has a big tobacco business,” said David. If he did not wonder, if he took this walk as the natural pleasant stretching of his legs, he was at ease. “Suppose you don’t like it?” David was silent. “Suppose you don’t like it--will you quit?” “Why--I guess so!” It had never occurred to David. Life was life. One did not question if one liked it. The air where one was one breathed. “Be sure of that!” Tom Rennard’s words came warm. “That is important. Hold on to your right to _choose_. Hold on to your right _not_ to choose.... I never really had that right.” David was silent again. He walked with a man, he walked with a world he had no sense of. But his legs went easy. “I’m a lawyer,” said Tom Rennard. “Didn’t you choose _that_?” “No ... I thought I had. I dreamed of being a lawyer. I fooled myself.” “What did you want to be?” “I don’t know that either.” He said “either.” Why did he say “either”? It was true. What did he know? David spoke with an elation like a release. “I don’t know, either. Really I don’t. You see--Uncle--Mr. Deane--he came up when mother died. I remember what he said. ‘Want to come to the big City and work for me?’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ I think I answered that. Yes--I did. I knew I’d said the wrong thing. My uncle sort of smiled. ‘This is no work for you.’ I was at the shop. ‘Will you come?’ ‘All right.’ ‘Better try,’ said uncle. ‘Your first years won’t bind you--nor me.’ That was all.” “Don’t let them bind you.” “But it wasn’t like that, when you started to be a lawyer?” “No, it wasn’t like that,” Tom Rennard smiled. “I wasn’t born in New York, either.” What was there David felt again in the word “either”? “My sister and I came East from Ohio.” “And you went to college and studied to be a lawyer?” “Not college. Law-school at night. Musty long rooms under dim gas jets. Days I was several things. I sold pen-knives for a time. I was a waiter in cheap restaurants. I worked in department stores. My sister earned next to nothing, then. At times, we shared one room.” David tramped on, limbs free. At his shoulder the lake and the farther shore. The mist was lifted from the day. The mist was concentrate in clouds. The day and the water were clear. He felt this man beside him, sharp and strange, in the new lucid air. His sharpness seemed right for the city. This man was a city man. David did not think there could be dim things--dim lights--ever in New York. Yet that picture he had of the law-school. “--an ideal setting, don’t you think?” Tom said, “for learning the law?”