Una listened murmuringly, and he was encouraged to try to express the inner life behind his jobs. Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia: carving initials, mowing lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe'en, his father's death, a certain Irving who was his friend, "carrying a paper route" during two years of high school. His determination to "make something of himself." His arrival in Columbus, Ohio, with just seventy-eight cents--he emphasized it: "just seventy-eight cents, that's every red cent I had, when I started out to look for a job, and I didn't know a single guy in town." His reading of books during the evenings of his first years in Ohio; he didn't "remember their titles, exactly," he said, but he was sure that "he read a lot of them." ... At last he spoke of his wife, of their buggy-riding, of their neat frame house with the lawn and the porch swing. Of their quarrels--he made it clear that his wife had been "finicky," and had "fool notions," but he praised her for having "come around and learned that a man is a man, and sometimes he means a lot better than it looks like; prob'ly he loves her a lot better than a lot of these plush-soled, soft-tongued fellows that give 'em a lot of guff and lovey-dovey stuff and don't shell out the cash. She was a good sport--one of the best." Of the death of their baby boy. "He was the brightest little kid--everybody loved him. When I came home tired at night he would grab my finger--see, this first finger--and hold it, and want me to show him the bunny-book.... And then he died." Mr. Schwirtz told it simply, looking at clouds spread on the blue sky like a thrown handful of white paint. Una had hated the word "widower"; it had suggested Henry Carson and the Panama undertaker and funerals and tired men trying to wash children and looking for a new wife to take over that work; all the smell and grease of disordered side-street kitchens. To her, now, Julius Edward Schwirtz was not a flabby-necked widower, but a man who mourned, who felt as despairingly as could Walter Babson the loss of the baby who had crowed over the bunny-book. She, the motherless, almost loved him as she stood with him in the same depth of human grief. And she cried a little, secretly, and thought of her longing for the dead mother, as he gently went on: