“There you go! Hanker! That’s a nice word to use before a lady. Hanker! I can see old man Fodder using it, while he spits foully on the floor and wipes his dirty whiskers with the back of his hand. Hanker! Nathan, you’ll leave me a nervous wreck!” “What should I say?” “Hunger is bad enough. Because you ‘never desired them’ would be better and more refined.” “Well, then, it’s never been because I’ve never desired them. But what can a fellow do when his father——” “That’s right! Blame your father! Blame your mother, blame your sister, blame your town, blame every one and everything but yourself! In a moment you’ll be blaming me! Do you remember the day after the Sunday-school picnic when your father flogged you for going off alone with me in the woods? Do you remember what I told you to do?” “Yes!” “What?” “Get a gun and shoot him!” “Precisely! Why didn’t you? Don’t you suppose that if you’d found a shotgun and peppered his hide with holes, the big, hypocritical, child-mauling bully wouldn’t have had a new respect for you and left you alone?” “But suppose I’d killed him?” “Well, suppose you had? Wouldn’t it have been what he deserved?” “But, Bernie! Be reasonable! You’re not advising a boy to get a gun and commit murder? Where would I have ended? In the electric chair or on the gallows.” “They don’t hang children!” “But do you think it would be pleasant to go through the rest of life with the realization that I’d shot my own father?” “If you were justified—as you were!—there would have been no remorse. Besides, if you had been hounded by remorse, it just goes to show you’ve got a clinging, messy, sentimental mind!” Nathan had a feeling that he was talking to some one who was not quite rational. Still, he was accustomed to dealing with irrational people—especially, The Sex. “I preferred not to do it,” he returned dully. “Just so! And your father walked all over you, and took your earnings, and imposed on you, and ground you down so that at twenty-one you flew into the arms of that little Richards slut. And now you come yowling around me for sympathy——” “I haven’t—I’m not—‘yowling around you for sympathy.’” “You needn’t think I haven’t any brains! You needn’t add that to your boorish insults! You came here to-night, with your cheap peasant wife dead and those silly love notes, thinking to stir up something of our kid romance—ask me to marry you, perhaps. As if I would marry you—you! Oh, my God, what an insult! I could call the police and have you ejected for it, right this minute!” “Oh, Bernie, please be reasonable! I haven’t asked you to marry me! I——” “You don’t need to add falsehood to it all. If I’d marry you to-morrow, you’d feel highly complimented, because there’s nothing in Paris to equal me. Isn’t that so?” Nathan hesitated to say “No,” and felt that “Yes” was falsehood. “Answer me!” “I hardly know, Bernie. I——” But Bernie was obsessed with her own assumption.