“Now you, Tom,” she called to the black-haired boy. “I told you kids to wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten and nothing done and you two reading books again.” The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she winced and twisted in his grasp. “You come with me,” he said. He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face. At the top of the stairway he stopped. “We go in here,” she said, pointing to a door. He took her into the room. “You get to sleep,” he said, and going out closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed. Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks. Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at him self-consciously. “Which of you two puts Mary to bed?” he asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. “Let Tom do it,” he said. “I will help you here.” Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him dry wiping towels. Sam’s coat was off and his sleeves rolled up. The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam’s breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother at work among other people’s soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home drunk, and the chill in his mother’s heart and in his own. There was something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.