Married to a cheap woman who “guessed he wouldn’t die” before she returned from a party where the chief item of interest was ice cream, lying in a slovenly claptrap of a home, excoriated by thoughtless local people, facing a court hearing and possible disgrace, laden with domestic obligations from which there was no escape in honor, as a man of his type conceives honor,—all harked back, I say, to the first day he had sought enlightenment about sex from the place he should have sought it, his mother, and been shocked instead into vicious repression. That childish “shocking” was an epilogue of all the sordid method of training him. For what? For exactly what Nathan was as he lay this night upon his bed. The intolerable vileness and injustice of the whole miserable business lay in the fact that the father and mother responsible not only went scot-free from the penalty son and daughter must pay, but saw absolutely no blame for themselves in that dénouement. Blame for themselves? They actually believed themselves wronged. Nathan rolled feverishly on his rumpled bed. “Bill,” he rambled on wistfully, “remember the walks and talks we had when we were kids—the nights under the starlight—the boat rides down the river when I looked into the future and the world seemed so beautiful and wonderful, it hurt? I dreamed of a future then, Bill, in which I was affluent and successful—a wonder-time when all my dreams were coming true. And have a look, Bill! I’m loaded with the disgrace of the box-shop failure and half the poor people in town, it seems, weeping over their lost savings; married to a wife I don’t seem to get along with—with a baby that isn’t being brought up at all the way I’d like to see her brought up—paying the bills of a home where I can’t even get food cooked to eat nor a bed made to sleep on—less than a hundred dollars to my name——” “I’ll loan you whatever money you need, Nat! How much——?”