wasn't really cheating because Gibson was such an ass in so many ways! Anyhow there was no doubt the world hated him. The world had always hated him. He had never got on with anybody in Angel Street. He had a filthy time at school, and then there was all this business, and oh, hell! what a rotten arm he had! He had determined against committing suicide. He remembered once saying to his mother after a row, saying with a strange mordant humour, "Mother, I think it'll be happier for the whole family if I commit suicide!" "If thou what? Speak plain!" "Kill myself! Throw myself in the river!" She had made no reply. She merely went to the sofa and sat trembling for a few minutes. She said "Feivel!" once, less with reproach than raw, ugly pain. All that day she did her housework unsteadily and said not a word to Philip. He hadn't liked it. No, it was better not to commit suicide. It savoured too imitatively, moreover, of the _Mighty Atom_, whom he had disliked. Then, in addition, the wife of somebody the watchmaker had recently tried it and succeeded. She obviously could have reaped no satisfaction from the episode. If only he could die accidentally! Would even that make his father sorry for his abominable treatment? The youthful corpse would lie on the parlour floor under a black cloth and everybody would sympathize frightfully with his mother and be pointedly chilly towards Reb Monash. Wouldn't he be sick about it! Wouldn't he ask God for another chance to behave like a decent sort of father, but all to no use! There would be his son's pale and romantic corpse lying stately beneath the cloth, with candles and things about. "Easeful Death," one of the poets said somewhere. That wasn't half strong enough. It was a triumph, a pageant! But it meant being carted off, didn't it, to the cold ground somewhere, and the weepers would go away and the candles be extinguished, and the rain would come down, and the coffin be sodden and fall away! That was where the worm-element came in, and with the worm-element he could pretend no sympathy; "where the worm became top-dog," as he had once brilliantly said in comment upon "And the play is the Tragedy, Man--the hero, the Conqueror--Worm!"