Mamise was disgusted. Abbie appeared at the door equally disgusted; it was intolerable that any one should slap her children but herself. She had accepted too much of Mamise’s money to be very indignant, but she did rise to a wail:
“Seems to me, Mamise, you might keep your hands off my childern.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father I just couldn’t help taking a whack at him. The little bully knocked over his brother’s house just to hear it fall. When he grows up he’ll be just as much of a nuisance as Jake and he’ll call it syndicalism or internationalism or something, just as Jake does.”
Jake came in on the scene. He brought home his black eye and a white story.
When Abbie gasped, “What on earth’s the matter?” he growled: “I bumped into a girder. Whatya s’pose?”
Abbie accepted the eye as a fact and the story as a fiction, 212 but she knew that, however Jake stood in the yard, as a pugilist he was the home champion.
She called Little Sister to bring from the ice-box a slice of the steak she had bought for dinner. On the high wages Jake was earning––or at least receiving––the family was eating high.
Little Sister told her brother Sam, “It’s a shame to waste good meat on his old black lamp.” And Sam’s regret was, “I wisht I’d ’a’ gave it to um.”
Little Sister knew better than to let her father hear any of this, but it was only another cruel evidence that great lovers of the public welfare are apt to be harshly regarded at home. It is too much to expect that one who tenderly considers mankind in the mass should have time to be kind to them in particular.
Jake was not even appreciated by Mamise, whom he did appreciate. Every time he praised her looks or her swell clothes she acted as if he made her mad.