However he did attempt to be more amiable with his father, and even went so far as to accompany him to the Denmark of an evening, and was there astonished to find how the old fellow by sheer wit and masterful presence lorded it over the company of clerks, shopkeepers, theater musicians, agents, brokers, bagmen, school teachers, the odd characters, the small talents of the neighborhood. René noticed that Mr. Sherman plied his father with drink to keep him lively, and that there seemed no question of payment for it. Mr. Fourmy paid in talk, yarns, jests, jokes, impromptu fantasies, with sly hits at the eccentrics of the assembly. And although René hated the atmosphere, the smoke, the drink, the greedy lapping up of gross laughter, the pouncing on scraps of filth and equivocal utterances, he could not escape some admiration of his father. This grew as they left the place and Mr. Fourmy shook off his air of large geniality and took his son by the arm and asked if they might go for a walk together. "To think," he said, "of your remembering a thing like that. And it did make a change too. You used to come running down the road to meet me when I came back from town. You stopped doing that. I noticed it once or twice, and then I gave no more heed to it. I never was much of a one to give heed to things. Can't stand things dull. Never could. I couldn't do what you're doing now, plodding away with those fat books of yours. It seems wonderful to me. I looked into one of them the other day. No. I never had the mind for it." "Father," said René solemnly, "when I was born, what did you feel like?" "Lord love a duck! What a question! I'd been expecting it, you know. And George was there, you know. But I'll tell you this, my lad. A child's wonderfully separate at once, and no amount of clucking will ever make it anything else. It's got its own separate life like the rest of us. We're all separate, and it's just as well not to forget it. We're never allowed to forget it for long. I forgot it. I thought we were a nice little happy family with no individuals in it at all--except myself. And then----" "What then?" "Then, my son, there was a nasty mess." "Oh!" "There always is a nasty mess. Marriage knocks a man to pieces and leaves him to put himself together again. Women are more brutal. They don't mind if marriage turns out to be no more than a pool of mud. Lord, Lord! a woman will bear a child almost every year of her bearing life and be no more than a little girl at the end of it, a prying, stealthy-minded little girl." René was enraged and shocked, but excited too, intellectually. He turned to his father and said: "Father, I want to know, I must know, how you could come back to my mother." "That," said Mr. Fourmy, "is what I am still asking myself."