With a quivering immersion he bent over his paper, lost to the keen realities of a city day. Sidling vagrants and transients from small towns glanced at him with morose disfavor and sometimes stopped to stare at this shabby young man whose head was never raised from his writing. His abstraction was an insult to their sense of idle release. He wrote for hours and only paused when hunger of a different kind began irresistibly to whisper within him, for he had not eaten since morning. It was six o’clock when he hastened from the park. He joined the homeward bound masses, feeling satiated and apart, and dreading the evening contact with his sagging, verbose parents. They were sitting and standing in two of the few postures that life still absentmindedly allowed them--bending over newspaper and frying-pan. “Well, I’ve lost my job,” he said to his father. His father dropped the newspaper and his mother shuffled in from the kitchen. “Lost your job--what do you mean?” said his mother with slow incredulity, as though she had just escaped being crushed by a falling wall. “They told me this morning that it had only been a temporary one and they paid me off. I thanked the clerk for his news but he didn’t seem to take it in the right spirit.” “Ach, I knew it would happen, I knew it,” said Mrs. Felman. “Here’s what you get from your ma-anooal labor! What kind of work is that for an educated boy like you? With your brains, now, you could go out on the road and sell goods. You should have more get-up about you. Mrs. Feinsthal was telling me at my whist-club today that her son Harry is making piles of money with Liebman and Company. Sells notions and knick-knacks. You could easy do the same if you had any sense in your head.” “Carrie’s right, this slavery is no work for a smart man,” said Mr. Felman. “Any fool, you know, can work with his hands, but it takes real intelligence to make a man buy something. I want you to be able to laugh at people, and feel independent, and not be a poor schlemiel all your life.” “Well, you’ve been a travelling salesman for twenty years,” said Carl, with a weary smile, “and before that you tried a general merchandise store, but it doesn’t seem to have brought you much money or happiness. You recommend a treacherous wine. The thing that you’ve fought for has always scarred and eluded you. What’s the reason?” Mr. Felman lowered his head while the round fatness of his face revealed a huddled confusion of emotions in which shame and annoyance predominated. He sat, tormenting his greyish red moustache, as though it were a fraudulent badge, and gazing with still eyes at a newspaper which he was not reading.