“Hasn’t it dawned on you,” she cried, her voice strained with hysteria, “why you’ve never gotten on in the world—why at twenty-seven you’re no further along than you were at seventeen? I’ll tell you! It’s because you’ve never been able to see yourself as others see you! You’re a boob! A hick! A sentimental little small-town vulgarian. And I bet at table you eat with your knife and blow your coffee in a saucer! No wonder you haven’t got ahead. Hasn’t there ever been a time when opportunity opened for you and then—when people you met saw you—that opportunity mysteriously closed? Answer me! Hasn’t there?” At once into poor Nathan’s distraught brain came the experience of the New York knitting-mills management. His acknowledgment showed plainly on his bewildered face. “Ah! I thought so!” cried Bernie exultantly. “And why did you lose that opportunity? Because you were a hick! Because you didn’t know how to act! Because you probably deported yourself before fine-grained, well-bred people the way you’ve been deporting yourself in my house to-night—like a savage who pads around naked before his family and tears his food apart with his fingers! That’s why you’ve never gotten ahead and you never will! You’re small-town, I say! You’re rube and hick! A vulgarian! And a rotter beside!” Nathan stared blankly ahead of him. Was he? He almost began to think that he was. Bernie drew a long jagged sigh for breath, stared at him in self-satisfaction, then arose abruptly and crossed the room to the steam radiator. Bending down, she rattled the valve to turn it off. She came back. Nathan was still in his daze. Hands on hips, a slurring sneer on her features, Bernie paused before him contemptuously. “Look at you!” she snapped. “Just as I say! Sit there and let a woman turn off a steam radiator—never make a single move, or offer to do it for her!” Again Nathan was taken aback. “You didn’t ask me,” he defended thickly. “Ask you! Ask you! And has a woman to ask a man every time she wants a thing done? I can see your father sticking out all over you! All her life your mother had to ask him to get things done. A gentleman would anticipate all a woman’s little whims and desires and please her before she had to ask for them! And you!—you—want to marry me!” Nathan was sick and getting sicker. More than sick, he felt bruised and bleeding, somehow. Bernice had jabbed the lance of her spleen into his most sensitive feelings of self-consciousness and handicap. Were all women like this, even the best of them? Again he had the feeling of holding out his hands to a woman and having them slapped. Slapped? His hands? Bernie was cuffing his hands, his mouth, his ears, belaboring him with blows from which he had no defense, which he could not return because she was woman, The Sex. “I guess I better go, Bernie,” he whispered huskily after a time.