The newcomer for an hour hung to the truck leechlike, without winning further recognition.  Then by insensible gradations, by standing on the truck bed as it moved, by edging forward toward the high seat, by silently helping with a weighty box, it seemed he had acquired the right to mount to the high seat of honour itself.  He did this without spoken words, yet with an ingratiating manner.  It was a manner that had been used, ages back, by the lordly driver of the present truck, when he had formed alliances with drivers of horse-drawn vehicles.  He recognized it as such and turned to regard the courtier with feigned austerity.

“Hello, kid!” he said, with permitting severity.  But secretly he rejoiced.  Now he was really old.

* * * * *

Winona viewed the latest avocation of her charge with little enthusiasm.  It compelled a certain measure of her difficult respect, especially when she beheld him worm his truck through crowded River Street with a supreme disregard for the imminent catastrophe—­which somehow never ensued.  But it lacked gentility.  At twenty-eight Winona was not only perfected in the grammar of morals, more than ever alert for infractions of the merely social code, but her ideals of refinement and elegance had become more demanding.  She would have had the boy engage in a pursuit that would require clean hands and smart apparel and bring him in contact with people of the right sort.  She stubbornly held out to him the shining possibility that he might one day rise to the pinnacle of a clerical post in the First National Bank.

True, he had never betrayed the faintest promise of qualifying for this eminence, and his freely voiced preferences sweepingly excluded it from the catalogue of occupations in which he might consent to engage.  But Winona was now studying doctrines that put all power in the heart’s desire.  Out of the infinite your own would come to you if you held the thought, and she serenely held the better thought for Wilbur, even in the moment of mechanical triumphs that brimmed his own cup of desire.  She willed him to prefer choicer characters than the roughs he consorted with, to aspire to genteel occupation that would not send him back at the day’s end grimed, reeking with low odours, and far too hungry.

His exigent appetite, indeed, alarmed her beyond measure, because he cried out for meat, whereas Winona’s new books said that meat eaters could hope for little reward of the spirit.  A few simple vegetables, fruits, and nuts—­these permitted the soul to expand, to attain harmony with the infinite, until one came to choose only the best among ideals and human associates.  But she learned that she must in this case compromise, for a boy demanding meat would get it in one place if not another.  If not at the guarded Penniman table, then at the low resort next to Pegleg McCarron’s of one T-bone Tommy, where they commonly devoured the carcasses of murdered beasts and made no secret of it.