“Perhaps I’ve inherited nothing from you save your curious inability at making money,” said Carl, trying to feel a ghost of compassion for this petrified, minor soldier lost in the uproar of a battle but still worshipping his glittering general. “You’ve spent all of your life in chasing a frigid will-o’-the-wisp, made out of the lining of your heart, and you want me to stumble after the same mutilated futility. You’re not unintelligent, as far as business ability goes, and yet, you’ve always been doomed to a kind of respectable poverty. Something else within you must have constantly fought with another delusion to produce such a result. You can’t simply blame it on luck--that’s an overworked excuse. Perhaps you failed to win your god because you’ve never been able to teach efficiency and strength to the spirit of cruelty within you. You have not been remorselessly shrewd, my father, and now you are paying the penalty.” “Well, because I’ve been a fool that’s no sign that you should be one, too,” answered Mr. Felman in a voice of reluctant and secretly tortured self-reproach. “Yes, I’ve been too kind-hearted for my own good, dammit, but I want that you should be different. It’s been too easy for people to swindle me. Yes, I want you to show them something that your poor old father couldn’t. Yes. And as for your talk about chasing money, tell me, how can a man live decent without plenty of money? How can he?” “We would have our nice store this very minute if your father had listened to me,” said Mrs. Felman, mournfully. “He never would let me handle the reins. I know how to be firm with people, believe me, but your father would always give credit to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry that walked into the store. And whenever he did have money he always gambled it away. Gambling has been the ruination of his life! All of your wildness, Carl, has come from your father’s side and not from mine!” Mr. Felman looked at his son with an embarrassed admission of secret sins, while for a moment he became a faun lamenting his awkwardness, and his uneasy smile quivered as it tried to say: “Alas, I am not so much better than you are, my crazy, foolish son.” Carl grinned in return and for the first time in his life was on the verge of feeling a slight communion with his shamefaced father. As the mother went on with her endless story of the father’s crimes and incapacities the rubbing of her words produced a glimmer of ill-temper. “Noo, don’t you ever stop?” he cried. “Always nagging about the past! I might be a rich man now if you hadn’t driven me crazy with your endless complaints and hollering. Never a moment of peace from the day I married you.” “I’ll have to give both of you something else to complain about,” said Carl. “I’m going to stop working for a while and write poetry, and send it away to magazines.”