She laughed. “Them?” she demanded. “Them? The man that owns this house said that if he'd known, Lem would never had it; they don't want convicts in this town. This is a moral burg. That's more than the women said to me though—the starved buzzards; if they've spoke a word to me since I never heard it.” Her voice rose in sharp mimicry: “You, Katie, come right up on the porch, child! Don't you know—! See, I'm going by.”
“I could have warned you of all that,” June Bowman asserted; “for the reason they're narrow, don't know anything about living or affairs; hypocritical too; long on churchgoing——”
Doret regarded him solemnly. How blind he was, a mound of corruptible flesh! He put the beer down and turned abruptly away, going up to Flavilla. She seemed better; her face was white but most of the fever had gone. He listened to her harsh breathing with the conviction that she had caught a cold; and immediately after he was back from the store with a bottle of cherry pectoral. She liked the sweet taste of the thick bright-pink sirup and was soon quiet. Lemuel sniffed the mouth of the bottle suspiciously. It was doped, he finally decided, but not enough to hurt her; tasting it, a momentary desire for stinging liquor ran like fire through his nerves. He laughed at it, crushing and throwing aside the longing with a sense of contempt and triumph.
He could hear occasionally Bowman's smooth periods and his wife's eager enjoyment of the discourse. His sense of worldly loneliness deepened; Flavilla seemed far away. All life was inexplicable—yes, and profitless, ending in weariness and death. The hunger for perfection, for God, that had been a constant part of his existence, the longing for peace and security, were almost unbearable. He had had a long struggle; the devil was deeply rooted in him. He could laugh at the broken tyranny of drugs and drink, but the passion for fine steel cutting edges was different, and twisted into every fiber. The rage that even yet threatened to flood him, sweeping away his painfully erected integrity, was different too. These things had made him a murderer.
“... not the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
He had a sudden muddled vision of another world, a world where sturdy men gave him their hands and in reality fulfilled June Bowman's mocking words. There the houses, the streets of his youth would have been impossible. Ah, he was thinking of another kind of heaven; it was a hop dream.
There was a stir below and he heard the clatter of plates. Dinner was in preparation. “Lem!” his wife called. “Mr. Bowman wants you to go to the butcher's.”
“Call me June,” he put in; adding: “Sure, Lem; the butcher's; we want a tenderloin, cut thick. You can't get any pep on greens; we ain't cattle.”
Doret felt that he would have been infinitely happier with his own thin fare. In a manner he got comfort from a pinch of hunger; somehow the physical deprivation gave him a sense of purification. The other man, purple with the meat and beer, shook out a cigarette from a paper pack.
“Always smoke caporal halves,” he proclaimed.