or aloof, gave him softly vague responses. Mrs. Felman, for the first time, looked out with heavy peace from behind the crinkling newspaper where she had been placidly nibbling at the perfumed logics of a latest divorce scandal. Her son had finally redeemed the evening by exhibiting a small but ordinary proficiency which drew him a little nearer to the dully efficient level of mankind, and her reflections upon his material future became a shade less hopeless. CHAPTER IV. At an early hour on the following morning she hurried Carl to the business section of the city so that the neighboring women, who slept late after getting breakfast for their men, would not see him from their windows, and at a department store she purchased a cheap suit of clothes for him. He dressed behind a small screen in the store, feeling like a small, eccentric lamb who was being glossed for the market. She left him at an elevated railroad station, extracting a dollar from her pocketbook with an air of intensely solemn and reflective importance. “Don’t waste it now; I know your tricks,” she said. “Be sure and get the afternoon paper and look through the want ads. Take anything at the start--don’t be high-toned.” Carl gave her the necessary monosyllables of assent and walked down the street, his mind busy with many insinuations. “Perhaps I’d better stop stealing for a while,” he said to himself. “If I keep it up without an intermission it’s going to land me in jail again and I’m not anxious for that circumscribed travesty to happen. That term of three months in Texas gave me a great deal of time in which to write, but the little animals in that place intruded with a bite that was both wistful and inadequate. It’s a little difficult to write about beauty and scratch your skin simultaneously--the proud stare of the former does not like to sit in the prison of a small irritation. It is an intricately adjusted equilibrium and the lunge of a finger nail can desecrate this subtly balanced aloofness. There is little difference between the bars of mind and actual iron rods, but when you are still partly inarticulate, physical motion can become a necessary recompense. No, for the time being I had better strain my hands in prayer against the tiny implements with which men felicitate their stupidity. Back and forth--but what else can I do?”