Suddenly Miss Binswanger clattered down her fork and pushed backward from the table; tears streamed toward the corners of her mouth.
"That's always the way! What's the use of getting off the track? All we want to say, papa, is we got a chance like we never had before to sublet. Forty dollars a month, and no children. For three months we could live in the city on family rates, and maybe for three months I'd know I was alive. A—a girl's got feelings, papa! And, honest, it—it ain't no trip, papa—what's forty-five minutes on the car with your newspaper?—honest, papa, it ain't."
Mr. Isadore Binswanger drained a glass of water.
"Give 'er a chance, pa. The boys'll show her a swell time in the city—Max Teitlebaum and all that crowd. It ain't no fun for me traipsin' out after her, lemme tell you."
Mr. Binswanger pushed back his chair and rose from the table. His eyes, the wet-looking eyes of age and asthma, retreated behind a network of wrinkles as intricate as overhead wiring.
"I wish," he cried, "I was as far as the bottom of the ocean away from such nonsense as I find in my own family. Up to my neck I'm full. Like wolfs you are! On my neck I can feel your breath hot like a furnace. Like wolfs you drive me till I—I can't stand it no more. All what I ask is my peace—my little house, my little pipe, my little porch, and not even my peace can I have. You—you're a pack of wolfs, I tell you—even your fangs I can see, and—and I—I wish I was so far away as the bottom of the ocean."
He shambled toward the door on legs bent to the cruel curve of rheumatism. The sun had dropped into a bursting west, and was as red as a mist of blood. Its reflection lay on the smooth lawn and hung in the dark shadows of quiet trees, and through the fulvous haze of evening's first moment came the chirruping of crickets.
"I wish I was so far away as the bottom of the ocean."
The tight-springed screen door sprang shut on his words, and his footsteps shambled across the wide ledge of porch. A silence fell across the little dining-table, and Miss Binswanger wiped at fresh tears, but her mother threw her a confident gesture of reassurance.
"Don't say no more now for a while, children."