My city. It isn't Eliot's unreal city streets, or Baudelaire's sordid city of poetry. It is not Dorian's sense of a city that gave birth to the man he is. To Dorian's ears, Bruce Wayne's city is something different. As if—as if the whole of Bruce's identity comes not just from a city that made him, but a city that he has claimed.

"So you endured and survived it."

You collectively, you specifically. Perhaps not you individually. How many of that 'tough breed' of Gothamites did not endure, he wonders? Dorian remembers the late nineteenth century Darwinists well. A breed is tough only because the weak don't make it.