And suppose Tom had been more prudent, and had not gone away with his old teacher? St. Peter sometimes wondered what would have happened to him, once the trap of worldly success had been sprung on him.
He couldn’t see Tom building “Outland,” or becoming a public-spirited citizen of Hamilton. What change would have come in his blue eye, in his fine long hand with the back-springing thumb, which had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas?
A hand like that, had he lived, must have been put to other uses. His fellow scientists, his wife, the town and State, would have required many duties of it. It would have had to write thousands of useless letters, frame thousands of false excuses. It would have had to “manage” a great deal of money, to be the instrument of a woman who would grow always more exacting.
He had escaped all that. He had made something new in the world—and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he had left to others.