"Steady, old girl," said Mr. Fourmy, with an almost tender firmness. He turned quietly round in his chair until he was looking sideways up at René. "Look here, young man, it takes two to make a scene, and I won't have it. It's no good trying to make a scene simply because you expected to have one if ever I came back. I spanked you the day before I left for throwing a knife at your brother in one of your baresark fits, and for two pins I'd turn you up and spank you now." Then René's memory played him a scurvy trick. "Boot or brush?" he asked himself, and a sick anger rose in him and hot tears welled into his eyes. He gasped and gurgled inarticulately, thinking he was making an appeal to his mother, but through his tears he seemed to see his father growing larger and larger, and in a gust of terror he lunged out of the room, seized his cap, and rushed from the house. "It isn't fair! it isn't fair!" he moaned. Other young men he knew had difficulties with their fathers, but to have a father suddenly materialize out of thin air and step back with exasperating ease into a relationship which a part of his family at least had forgotten, was too critical for the mind to bear. René had been priding himself on the fact that at last he was to be as other young men, a wage-earner, a reputable citizen, a prop to his mother, a credit to his family and his own aspirations. And here suddenly he was to begin all over again. His painful emotions were akin to those of a small boy on the arrival of a new baby in his home, or to those of a tit on finding a cuckoo's monstrous egg in its nest, and, being of a cultivated intelligence, he could not immediately and robustly draw on his instinct to adjust himself to the new circumstances. He called on George. The Nest was in darkness. He went on hammering at the door until the window above it was thrown open. "Who's there?" snarled George. "If it's the police, the window's left open for the cat, and I'm damned if I shut it." "It's me--René!" "What the hell do you want at this time of night?" "I must see you. Something has happened." "What?" "Come down and let me in." He was filled with a cold and shuddering feeling of being ridiculous as he waited. He wanted to run away, but that would have been even more absurd. The chain of the door rattled, the bolts rapped back, and George said: "Come in. You've wakened Elsie, and she's not at all well." "But I wanted to see you. Father's come back." "What?" "Father's come back." "Mother all right?" "She seems quite pleased." "Then there's nothing more to be said. If you don't like him, tell him he's got to pay the rent. That'll clear him out fast enough. Good night."