When he stepped from the car he was confused for a minute. In the mining camp at present substituted for the former terminal he was green as a tenderfoot. It took him a second to get his bearings, but as soon as he found himself fighting for his feet in the dear old stream of commuters he knew he was at home again. The heady jostle among familiar types made him feel that he hadn’t been gone five days, although the way the horde swept past him proved that he had lost some of his old-time skill and cunning in a crowd. But he didn’t mind; he was here on a holiday, and they were here on business and had their rights. He recognized every mother’s son of them. Neither the young ones nor the old ones were a day older.
They wore the same clothes, carried the same bundles and passed the same remarks. The solid business man weighted with the burden of a Long Island estate was there; the young man in a broker’s office who pushed his own lawn mower at New Rochelle was there; the man who got aboard at One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street was there. There was the man with the Van Dyke, the man with a mustache, and the fat, smooth-shaven man, and the wives, the sisters and the stenographers of all these. They were just as Galbraithe had left them—God bless ’em.
Swept out upon Forty-second Street, he took a long, full breath. The same fine New York sky was overhead (the same which roofed Kansas) and the same New York sun shone down upon him (even as in its gracious bounty it shone upon Kansas). The thrill of it made him realize as never before that, though the intervening years had been good to him, New York was in his blood. His eyes seized upon the raw, angular buildings as eagerly as an exiled hill man greets friendly mountain peaks. There are no buildings on earth which look so friendly, once a man gets to know them, as those about the Grand Central. Galbraithe noticed some new structures, but even these looked old. The total effect was exactly as he had left it. That was what he appreciated after his sojourn among the younger cities of the West. New York was permanent—as fixed as the pole star. It was unalterable.
Galbraithe scorned to take cab, car or bus this morning. He wanted to walk—to feel beneath his feet the dear old humpy pavement. It did his soul good to find men repairing the streets in the same old places—to find as ever new buildings going up and old buildings coming down, and the sidewalks blocked in the same old way. He was clumsy at his hurdling, but he relished the exercise.