“Nathan’s ill,” she declared. “I met the Doctor’s wife at the missionary meeting this afternoon and she told me. He ate something last night that disagreed with him and had a bad case of acute indigestion along toward morning. But the Doctor says what really ails Nat is a general nervous breakdown and collapse. You’d better go over. If there’s anything I can do, let me know. I’ll keep your supper in the fireless cooker.” I went to the Pine Street cottage. Milly had always distrusted me. She said Nathan “carried tales” to me about herself and her folks. Therefore she was customarily surly when she admitted me. I found Nathan in a side room, the place warmed by a stinking oil heater. He was lying on his stomach in a rumpled bed, his fevered face buried in his arms. He turned over when I entered. He smiled grimly. Milly stood at the door for an instant and then said—to Nathan: “Guess you’ll live till I get back. I’m going down to mother’s. Ruth’s having a party and——” “Yeah!” shrieked little Mary, “and they’re gonna have ice cream!” So Mildred and the child slammed out of the house. I scooped an armful of miscellaneous clutter from a chair and swung it over to Nat’s bedside. But first I lowered the window and changed the air. “I’m glad you’ve come, Bill,” he said huskily. “If it wasn’t for you and old Gridley, there’s times it seems I’d be almost ready to quit.” “Buck up, old man,” I told him. “Nothing’s so bad that it can’t be worse.” “Yes, I know! And God Almighty hates a quitter! But I’m so muddled and antagonized and shot to pieces physically that I’ve almost lost my grit to go on. I’ve lost it, Billy, because somehow I can’t see much incentive for going ahead.” We talked then as men will talk. We were not choice as to metaphor or idiom. We discussed The Sex with relieving frankness; we did not refer to spades as long-handled agricultural implements used to turn over the sod to find fishworms or for the digging of graves. “Bill! Bill!” my friend cried feverishly. “Tell me what it’s all for! Tell me why it’s happened to me like this! Tell me where I’ve erred! Tell me how it’s all to end! What’s the constructive meaning in it all, Bill,—and is there any constructive meaning?” Tell him? How could I tell him? How could I make him see that his present predicament was as simple a dénouement of causes set in motion years back as it was natural for a field of waving corn to follow the dropping of potent yellow kernels in the spring.