His hands being in his pockets, Teddy fingered the twenty-dollar bill. He did this unconsciously, merely because it was there. It did occur to him to wish it was his own; but his wishes went no farther. They had gone no farther when he swung on his heel to go back to the kitchen. He must tell his mother that he didn’t have fifteen dollars put away. He hadn’t done so at once merely because his emotions had been too strong for him. He pulled his burly figure down the length of the room as one who has to drag himself along. If he had only been Fred Inglis, he would have handed his mother a sheaf of bills with instructions to buy all she wanted. Why couldn’t he, Teddy Follett, do the same? He was, as Gussie phrased it, a great big fellow of twenty-one—and his value was only eighteen per. He had proved that to his own satisfaction, for in secretly trying to unearth a better place he had been offered less than he got at Collingham & Law’s. What were the shackles that bound him? Were they of his own creation, or were they forced on him by the world outside? He was as industrious as his father had been, and, except for a tendency to do his work with a broad grin, just as wholehearted. If good intentions had commercial value, both father and son should have been rated high; but here was his father a bit of old junk, while he himself, having reached man’s estate, having served his country, having tacitly offered himself to the limit of his strength, was rewarded with a wage on which he could hardly live, to say nothing of helping others live. Madly, wildly, these thoughts churned in his mind as he lurched down the room toward the kitchen, while Pansy watched him with a look into which she was putting all her soul. He knew what he would say. He would say: "Ma, it’s no go. I haven’t a red cent. We’ve got to eat cold and wash cold till Saturday, anyhow. We’ll not look farther ahead than that. When Saturday comes, we’ll see." But, on the threshold of the kitchen, he saw something which brought a new sensation. In free fights while in the navy he had thought he had seen red; but he had never seen red like this. He had never supposed it possible that this torrent of wrath, tenderness, and pity should rise within himself, a fountain spouting at the same time both sweet water and bitter. His mother was seated at the table, crying. The ham bone was before her, the rags of meat on the plate, and the knife on top of them. But she, like Gladys a few minutes previously, had covered her face with her hands, while her shoulders rocked. In all his twenty-one years Teddy had never seen his mother cry. He had cried; the girls had cried; his father had very nearly cried; but his mother never. The strong spirit had grieved in strong ways, but not in this way. Now it seemed as if all the griefs she had laid up since the days when she was Lizzie Scarborough had heaped themselves to the point at which these strange, harsh, unnatural tears were their only assuagement.