When the day was over he went home and ascended to his room in silence. The work had left him with a curious irritating sense of its distastefulness. The second day was as the first--the week was as the month. There were no variations, no difficulties, no advancement. With the round of monotony his irritation sharpened. When Jerry Pollard spoke he responded in monosyllables; when Jerry Pollard's pretty daughter, Bessie, smiled in from the doorway, he kept his eyes on the counter. At home he was even less responsive. The impulse which had prompted him to return a cheering falsehood to his stepmother passed quickly. He sacrificed himself to the family interests, but he sacrificed himself begrudgingly. His face assumed lines of sullen repression; the tones of his voice were full of subdued resentment. He found satisfaction in meeting their overtures with irony, their constraint with callousness. Since he had given the one thing they required and he valued, he justified himself in a series of petty tyrannies. He met his stepmother with avoidance, his father with aversion. The children he swore at or ignored. Amos Burr, gathering his slow wits together, regarded him with a chuckle of self-congratulation. His sensibilities were not susceptible to slight friction, and his son's attitude seemed to him of small significance. He had got what he wanted, and that was sufficient unto the hour. After the first two months, Nicholas underwent a dogged and indifferent adaptation. He ceased to think of the judge, of Juliet, of Eugenia. He laughed at Jerry Pollard's jokes and he winked at Jerry Pollard's daughter. His horizon narrowed to the four walls of the shop; he told himself that he had a roof above his head and fuel for his stomach--that Bessie Pollard had skin that was fairer than Eugenia's and lips as red. What did it matter, after all? Sometimes Mrs. Webb entered the store, sweeping him, as she swept the counter, with her clear, cold glance, and once Sally Burwell ran in to do an errand for her mother and nodded with distant pleasantness as she met his eyes. At such times he flushed and ground his teeth, but after Mrs. Webb came farmer Turner, who shook his hand and said: "Wall, I'm proud of you, Nick Burr." And after Sally Burwell pretty Bessie Pollard threw him a kiss from the doorway. It was not that he was ashamed of his work. He knew that at the close of the war better men than he sought and accepted gratefully such a livelihood as he disdained--that women in whose veins ran good old English blood left their wasted homes to teach in public schools, or turned their delicate hands to the needle for support. He was ashamed of his past ambition--of his vaunted aspiration--and he was ashamed of Jerry Pollard and his service.