The baby was born and any neatness and housewifery which Milly may have shown before its arrival were quickly dispensed with, “caring for baby.” Milly apparently spent whole days and weeks “caring for baby.” Her floors went unswept and her dishes went unwashed. Nathan subsisted on various sticky pastries procured from the Élite Bakery. With increasing frequence he was advised frankly to “go up town and get his supper” because “care of baby” had so preoccupied the shining hours that Milly hadn’t even had time to do up her hair. Which was self-evident. If she “did up her hair” twice a week, she performed the extraordinary. She “twisted it up for comfort” in the morning and it was still twisted up for comfort when she retired at night. And Milly was always overworked, frightfully overworked. She said so. Nathan had to listen. All this, while Johnathan was doing his utmost at the factory to show his son that he was wrong in everything on general principle and all the trouble between father and son was Nat’s conceit, incorrigibility and inherent animosity against “retrenchment.” Nathan had heard somewhere about the queer, constricted twinge which comes to a father who feels the tiny fingers of his first-born grip his own. Nathan felt no such twinge. The baby was born at the Richards’ home across the “flats.” Nathan had wished his wife to go to the local hospital but Milly was shy of hospitals. She called them “butcher shops.” Nathan ate his meals at the Élite the week preceding the great event and slept in an unmade bed in a slovenly house. Then one mid-afternoon young Tom burst into the box-shop office. Excitedly he accosted Nathan. “Hey!” he yelled. “Yer kid’s come! An’ I lost my bet with Mickey Sweeney. I said it was gonna be a boy and the darn thing’s cost me thirty cents!” Nathan went at once to the “house across the flats.” The baby was much in evidence, or its lungs were. Nathan thought it sounded like the Victrola when the needle ran off and played one horrible sound over and over. The child looked like a worm and was hideously homely. Mrs. Richards refused to let him take it. He could see Milly “sometime to-morrow.” He went back to the shop. Six men had “walked out cold” because Johnathan had seized upon his enforced absence to insist they load a freight car his way and in the defiance of a method Nathan and the men had spent months in perfecting. “Huh! Father, are you?” sniffed Johnathan. “And the milk isn’t wiped off your own chin yet. A father! Fiddlesticks!” Five years of this, incredible as it may seem, and now the box-shop had gone the way of all flesh. Nathan slept in the dark, old Caleb and myself the only sincere friends he had on earth. Oh, Mediocrity! What crimes against youth may be committed in thy name! V The evening following Nathan’s release from custody, my mother met me as I entered our home, the hour about seven-thirty.