_Jerry is pretending to be interested only in sucking his teeth--but you can see that he is both sorry he made his admission and increasingly aware that his wife is being unpleasant._ CHARLOTTE. But you decided to give that up, eh? JERRY. Sure. I gave up everything when I got married. CHARLOTTE. Even gave up being a postman, eh? That’s right. Blame it all on me! Why, if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t even be what you are--a fifty-dollar-a-week clerk. JERRY. That’s right. I’m only a fifty-dollar-a-week clerk. But you’re only a thirty-dollar-a-week wife. CHARLOTTE. Oh, I am, am I? JERRY. I made a big mistake when I married you. CHARLOTTE. Stop talking like that! I wish you were dead--dead and buried--cremated! Then I could have some fun. JERRY. Where--in the poorhouse? CHARLOTTE. That’s where I’d be, I know. _Charlotte is not really very angry. She is merely smug and self-satisfied, you see, and is only mildly annoyed at this unexpected resistance to her brow-beating. She knows that Jerry will always stay and slave for her. She has begun this row as a sort of vaudeville to assuage her nightly boredom._ CHARLOTTE. Why didn’t you think of these things before we got married? JERRY. I did, a couple of times, but you had me all signed up then. _The sound of uncertain steps creaking down the second floor. Into the room at a wavering gait comes Jerry’s father, Horatio--“Dada.”_ _Dada was born in 1834, and will never see eighty-eight again--in fact, his gathering blindness prevented him from seeing it very clearly in the first place. Originally he was probably Jerry’s superior in initiative, but he did not prosper, and during the past twenty years his mind has been steadily failing. A Civil War pension has kept him quasi-independent, and he looks down as from a great dim height upon Jerry (whom he thinks of as an adolescent) and Charlotte (whom he rather dislikes). Never given to reading in his youth, he has lately become absorbed in the Old Testament and in all Old Testament literature, over which he burrows every day in the Public Library._