What confronted the boy most immediately was, of course, the city. All the rest was new perhaps. But its newness was a growth, and that which had gone before had subliminally taught him what such growth must be. New York, however, as he now received it, was unheralded and unanticipated. Mornings, as he went downtown, its acerb qualities entered him most forcibly. This was due perhaps to the night’s influence upon himself in opening his spiritual pores, making him more sensitive, since more alien, to the city’s nature. But also, doubtless, the early drubbing itself awake from the miasma of its sleep calls to the surface in the morning the City’s essences. Quincy’s heart misgave him in these first trials. He hung on a strap in the elevated train. The shaken condiment of sluggish bodies and drowned voices and falsetto-screaming newspapers was like a plaster for drawing out his strength. As they lurched on, the cadenced rise and fall of the train’s pace grew to be a hammer on his consciousness. The streets hurled by in a drab monotone whose single, ugly accent could be no other than that of a fierce indifference. The crowd congealed within itself, a maze of cluttered energies, having no mind. And as the mournful streets struck past, a tithe of the crowd leaked out, mute, sullen, while those remaining gave no flash of interest. None of the murmurous expectancy of a crowd turned to adventure, none of the resilient interplay of personality transfigured the dull mass. A community this was! The iron car and the vile brick houses moved. _It_ seemed to rot! Quincy felt lonely unto pain in it. So cruel the silences of the woods had never been, as this inert cacophony of union. And then, the sequel, as the train swung on, leaving him behind at the place which irony called his “destination.” The huddled, nervous, slack-eyed flow churned by some unknown design between the dizzy walls of offices and there absorbed as if to add by their own crushed spirit to the towers of brick and mortar. The poisonous sense of innumerable little cells--like the one to which he went--where all this half-quick matter was laid out, agitant yet fixed like flies in the shifting scum of stagnant waters. A pulp it was for the increasing of the City. Quincy thought of the innumerable living things of the sea whose rotted bones made up the chalk cliffs of England. So, it appeared to him, had the City come to be. For what other than some such passion, inexorable and perverse, could explain the blind din of traffic merging into the barriers of buildings--monuments all to work’s travesty, where the pride of labor was shrunk to an interminable lamentation? Each morning, at first, these things gripped Quincy while his heart forsook him. So that he found it hard to go, hard to bear, easy to fall away.