“Well, I’m so glad you liked it,” said Mrs. Benjamin, another woman in the group, who felt that it was time to advance a well-placed sentence. “I want you to meet my husband. Mo, this is Mister Felman, who’s just come back from the army.” “Glad t’ meet yuh,” said the man on the doorstep, blurring the words in a swiftly mechanical fashion, but looking very closely at Carl. Carl returned the salutation in the same fashion, taking a shade of amusement from his parrot-like impulse. These hollow creatures--what else could one do save to imitate their mannerisms and ideas, for self-protection, and rob and defraud them at every opportunity, thus giving them a mild apology for existence? After another round of wary commonplaces he managed to break away. His mother met him at the door and he said “Hello” and was about to pass her when her sharp voice halted him. “You haven’t got an ounce of affection in you! A nice way to greet your mother! Hello, and he walks right by like I was some boy he met on the street.” For a moment Carl stood without answering. This woman who had given birth to him--an incomprehensible chuckle of an incident--was almost non-existent to his emotions--a mere shadow that held an incongruously raucous voice and guarded one of the gates of his surface prison. As he stood in the hallway, doubting the reality of her shrill voice, he asked himself: “Am I an inhuman monster, unfit to touch this woman’s dress, or am I a poet standing with candid erectness in an alien situation?” Suddenly the question became unimportant to him and he felt that he had merely offered his inevitable self the choice between an imaginary halo and an equally fantastic strait-jacket. If his mother actually longed for an affection which he did not hold, it would be inexpensive to toss her the counterfeit coins of gestures and words. When she finished her staccato diatribe, he bowed deeply to her, with the palm of one hand lightly interrogating the buttons of his coat, raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it at great length. “Na-a, go away with your silliness,” she said. “I know you don’t mean it.” Her narrow face loosened for a moment and a shimmer of compensation found her eyes. This queer son of hers might be faintly realizing, after all, the unselfish intensity of her efforts to give him a position of honor and respectability in the world. Perhaps he was only wild and young, and would finally press his shoulders against the admired harness of material success. It could not be possible that one who had struggled from her flesh would remain a remote idiot and ignore the warm shrewdness within her that life had somehow swindled.