Nathan took issuance with old Jake one Sunday, however, for producing a flat, brown hip-flask and using copious draughts therefrom to “give him an appetite.” Thereafter old Jake “made his vittles set right” with more. The lad, sick of the whole Richards tribe, at the frayed end of his patience generally, advised old Jake in hot phrases to work up his appetites and make his vittles set right with alcohol elsewhere,—never to repeat the disgusting performance in his home again. A dour time followed. Old Jake had imbibed enough to be quarrelsome. Milly took her father’s part. She called Nathan a hypocrite because “he couldn’t stand the sight of a little hooch.” It was her house as well as Nathan’s and if Nathan didn’t like it, she guessed she knew what he could do. Which Nathan did. He grabbed old Jake by turkey neck and trouser seat and threw him out into the mud. Old Jake’s flask and hat followed. So did the Richards tribe, though they went voluntarily and sidestepped the mud. They swore they had been insulted; they would never set foot in Nathan’s house again. But a month later they were back; old Jake had apologized, he had said “blood was thicker than water” and it didn’t pay to hold grudges. And they descended on the large assortment of table delicacies purchased the previous evening at the Élite Bakery and ate until the boy wondered if sheer hunger hadn’t driven them back. He thought they must conserve their appetites during the week to distend their stomachs on Sunday noon at his expense. The same superficial logicians who would acclaim Nat a weakling for not leaving his father to learn his lesson at the box-shop would undoubtedly have the boy kick his way out of the domestic slough in which he had slipped now, get divorced and make a fresh start elsewhere. Very good indeed for those able to see the situation in perspective or whose enlightenment permits them so to decide the matter for their own gratification. Nathan could not see the situation in any perspective; he had little training and less enlightenment to help him decide any matter; he only knew that in his heart was a blind, piteous groping for something higher and better, knew instinctively that this sort of thing was not for him and that he had blundered, blundered horribly. But how to correct that blunder was quite another question. There was a baby coming! The lad couldn’t bring himself to cast aside or leave a woman “in Milly’s condition” as Mother Richards sighed over it. One narrow mistake, made far back the day Mrs. Forge had whirled on her small son and scared him so badly anent sex, had been followed by another and another. As he grew older, blunder after blunder had rolled up, like a ball of soft snow juggernauting down hill. Now he was about to become a father, temperamentally a pathetic mixture of half man, half boy himself. No, he could see no self-justification in separating from Milly. Not then. And things went from bad to worse.