Suddenly the question became unimportant to him and he felt that he had merely offered his inevitable self the choice between an imaginary halo and an equally fantastic strait-jacket. If his mother actually longed for an affection which he did not hold, it would be inexpensive to toss her the counterfeit coins of gestures and words. When she finished her staccato diatribe, he bowed deeply to her, with the palm of one hand lightly interrogating the buttons of his coat, raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it at great length.
“Na-a, go away with your silliness,” she said. “I know you don’t mean it.”
Her narrow face loosened for a moment and a shimmer of compensation found her eyes. This queer son of hers might be faintly realizing, after all, the unselfish intensity of her efforts to give him a position of honor and respectability in the world. Perhaps he was only wild and young, and would finally press his shoulders against the admired harness of material success. It could not be possible that one who had struggled from her flesh would remain a remote idiot and ignore the warm shrewdness within her that life had somehow swindled.
The elder Felman was reading his paper in the dining-room. He greeted Carl with a somnolent imitation of interest, but the heat, aided by a day spent in pungent saloons, had cheated him of most of his mental consciousness. He had become so thoroughly accustomed to drink that an artificial buoyancy scarcely ever invaded the dull ending of his days.
“We-e-ell, where did you go to-day?” he asked, feeling some slight craving for sound and trying to rouse his material anticipations.
He abandoned his seductive newspaper, with its melodrama that was pleasant because it murdered at a distance, and questioned Carl with his sleepy eyes.
“Went to a couple of factories, but the foremen were disgusted with the cut of my clothes,” said Carl. “They felt that the wearing of a new and unwrinkled suit revealed an intelligence which should not be possessed by an applicant for manual labor. I tried to convince them that the semblance was false in my case, but they refused to be persuaded.”
“Always trying to joke. That won’t get you anything. The main thing is—did you get work, or didn’t you?”
“No, I did not. I applied for manual labor, but I forgot to put on overalls.”
Mrs. Felman stood in the doorway and lifted a skillet in simple wrath.