Lester did not so much mind the way this subtly injected poison ate into the fibers of childless women. They might, for all he cared, let their insane hankering for a cloak with the “new sleeves” force them to put blood-money into buying it, and allow their drugged desire for such imbecile things to wall them in from the bright world of impersonal lasting satisfactions. They hurt nobody but themselves. If the Jerome Willings of the world were smart enough to make fools of them, so much the worse for them. Although the spectacle was hardly an enlivening one for a dyspeptic man forced to pass his life in contact with it. But what sickened Lester was the unscrupulous exploitation of the home-making necessity, the adroit perversion of the home-making instinct. Jerome Willing wanted to make it appear, hammering in the idea with all the ingenious variations of his advertising copy, that home-making had its beginning and end in good furniture, fine table linen, expensive rugs.... God! how about keeping alive some intellectual or spiritual passion in the home? How about the children? Did anybody suggest to women that they give to understanding their children a tenth part of the time and real intelligence and real purposefulness they put into getting the right clothes for them? A tenth? A hundredth! The living, miraculous, infinitely fragile fabric of the little human souls they lived with--did they treat that with the care and deft-handed patience they gave to their filet-ornamented table linen? No, they wrung it out hard and hung it up to dry as they did their dishcloths. And of course what Jerome Willing wanted of every employee was to join with all his heart in this conspiracy to force women still more helplessly into this slavery to possessions. Any one who could trick a hapless woman into buying one more thing she had not dreamed of taking, he was the hero of the new régime! That was what Jerome Willing meant when he talked about “making good.” Making good what? Not good human beings! That was the last thing anybody was to think of. And as to trying to draw out from children any greatness of soul that might lie hidden under their immaturity.... “You’re late again, Mr. Knapp,” said Harvey Bronson’s voice, rejoicing in the accusation.