"It's not true," he said, haltingly, using feeble words because stronger had not yet had time to surge up to the surface.
"Bosh!" said the father.
Then Bonbright blazed. Restraints crumbled. The Harvard manner peeled off and lay quivering with horror at his feet. He stepped a pace closer to his father, so that his face was close to his father's face, and his smoldering eyes were within inches of his father's scornful ones.
"It's a lie," he said, huskily, "a damned, abominable, insulting lie."
"Young man," his father shipped back, "be careful…."
"Careful!… I don't know who carried this thing to you, but whoever did was a miserable, sneaking mucker. He lied and he knew he lied. … And you, sir, you were willing to believe. Probably you were eager to believe…. I sha'n't defend Miss Frazer. Only a fool or a mucker could believe such a thing of her…. Yes, I have been to see her, and I'll tell you why…. I'll tell you why, good and plenty! … My first day in this place she was the only human, pleasant thing I met. Her smile was the only life or brightness in the place…. Everything else was dead men's bones. The place is a tomb and it stinks of graveclothes. Our whole family stinks of graveclothes. Family tradition!… Men dead and rotten and eaten by worms—they run this place, and you want me to let them run me…. Every move you make you consult a skeleton…. And you want to smash and crush and strangle me so that I'll be willing to walk with a weight of dead bones…. I've tried. You are my father, and I thought maybe you knew best…. I've submitted. I've submitted to your humiliations, to having everything that's ME—that is individual in me—stamped out, and stuff molded to the family pattern rammed back in its place. … She was the only bright spot in the whole outfit—and you kicked her out…. And I've been going to see her—just to see her smile and to get courage from it to start another day with you…. That's what my life has been here, and you made it so, and you will keep on making it so…. Probably you'll grind me into the family groove. Maybe I'm ground already, but that doesn't excuse what you've just said, and it doesn't make it any less an abominable lie, nor the man who reported it to you any less a muck-hearted sewer…"
He stopped, pale, panting, quivering.
"How dare you!… How dare—"
"Dare!"… Bonbright glared at his father; then he felt a great, quivering emotion welling up within him, a something he was ashamed to have the eye of man look upon. His lips began to tremble. He swung on his heel and ran staggeringly toward his door, but there he stopped, clutched the door frame, and cried, chokingly, "It's a lie. … A lie…. A slimy lie!"