Milly promised. She would have promised “to go seventy miles up the Amazon River, turn to the right and stay there the rest of her life” if Nathan had desired it. So far as her small, commonplace soul was capable, she worshiped the young foreman as the Greeks once worshiped Apollo. Her feminine intuition grasped the difficulties Nathan encountered with his father’s twopenny policies. She sympathized with him. Because it had been Nathan’s business and Nathan’s father, she had remained in her place during the “strike.” Once when the boy had been compelled to work supperless until midnight, installing a new motor, she had plodded uptown in a storm of sleet and bought him a basket of lunch.

The boy was not insensible to these indications of interest. He felt rather buoyant about them. He was something in the nature of a lady-killer. But to “let himself go” down into the slough of such a liaison, he could not. Milly was “factory help.” Owner’s sons didn’t do such things. She was preposterously out of caste.

Yet he enjoyed the sensation of being the object of an unrequited affection. It flattered his vanity. Without appearing to do so, he threw favors in Milly’s way. Once when she injured her hand on a jagged box nail, he applied first aid, and second aid and third aid and fourth. He contended such dressings were merely saving the business from the expense of doctor’s fees. He was thus forestalling a suit for damages from Milly. It was a matter of business acumen, pure and simple. Once when Old Jake had been abusively intoxicated and taken her weekly pay envelope cruelly in the street, Nat had called her back and presented her with a second envelope, from his own money. It made him feel rather heroic to do this.

Further than these small experiments in fire-playing, there was nothing between them. Of course not. There could never be anything between them. Yet there were times when the two found themselves alone together in the printing room, especially in the summer time when Milly’s collar disclosed a generous V of soft chest as white as milk, that the boy’s fancies ran riot. They carried him away, back to Foxboro Center days when he and I had first come in contact with the mystery surrounding sex, especially The Sex. She was only a factory girl. Of course. And yet, well, she had shown in a hundred crass ways that she loved him. She would love him more if he would allow it. All in all, it was not unpleasant. Yet the situation was not without its pathos. Milly could not help being one of Old Jake’s offspring.

Meanwhile, of course, he was in love with Carol, very much in love with Carol.

III

How much he was in love with Carol only the heart of a nineteen-year-old could attest.

Having discovered how easy and simple it was to keep nocturnal trysts, Nathan began to show a sudden filial docility which pleased and puzzled Johnathan. The father soon realized that an entire fortnight had passed during which he had accounted for every moment of his son’s time—perfect alibis in every instance—and not once had Nathan seen or spoken to the girl. If Nathan had gone two weeks without her, of course he had taken his father’s counsel and given up the Sybarite forever. That was only logic. If the boy showed a strange and unaccountable drowsiness around three o’clock each afternoon, or if it became increasingly difficult to awaken him each morning at five-thirty, it was—according to his mother—because he was “working too hard to the shop.” To which Nathan amusedly subscribed. Because he had given heed to his father and yielded obedience without that threatened murder being necessary, Johnathan conceived the idea of letting the boy have a week’s vacation and take a little trip somewhere, say down to Nantasket. Nathan, however, failed to enthuse. With visible relief on Johnathan’s part, the vacation idea was swiftly dropped. The father did not cease from reminding the son of the former’s magnanimity, however, when later differences arose upon other matters.

The thing which troubled Nathan in those hectic days was Edith’s propensity to be allowed the same nocturnal privilege. It was quite all right for Nathan to spend his nights in the company of a reasonably pretty girl who was treated “cruelly” by her relatives. He was a man. But MacHenry shot too good a game of Kelly pool to make Nathan feel that a duplication of the stunt by his sister was advisable. His anxiety was ended one morning, however, when Edith fell over a chair in the outer hallway on her return, before her brother knew she had been out. The parents did not awaken but Nathan did. He leaped out to find Edith’s hair down and her clothing torn. One sleeve of her shirt waist was slit to ribbons and she was limping painfully.

“What’s happened, Edie; where you been?” the brother cried frightenedly.