Your hideously wronged father,
Jonathan H. Forge.
Nathan crossed to one of the lobby chairs and sat down. He lighted one of his cigars absently. Once or twice he smiled bitterly. Then he picked up the several sheets covered on both sides with his father’s weak, pothook penmanship and read them again. When his cigar had been smoked to the end, he went upstairs to the writing room, laid aside hat and raincoat, lighted a fresh cigar and at twenty minutes to nine o’clock started his reply. It was ten minutes after one when he signed his name.
For the first time in his life, Nathan unleashed his righteous wrath and told his father what he thought of him. For the first time, devoid of religious fetish or mawkish “respect”, the son drew forth the whips of his scorn and laid them without stint on his father’s naked back. He had nothing to lose which he cared for, and nothing to gain that he desired. With a maturing understanding, a cold brain and a righteous anger, he gave his father to understand in no uncertain terms what he thought of his “twenty-five years of sacrifice” and his “right to happiness”—with a strange woman.
“I am not interested in the lady,” he concluded; “not because you want to shelve mother and take up with another woman but the method you essay—a rather contemptible method from my standpoint—to go about it. God was mighty real to you and a hard taskmaster when Edith and I were growing, reaching out and demanding that nature be answered with the most natural and normal things of life. Apparently He’s taking a vacation when you arrive at the place where you want them yourself. I’m not calling you a hypocrite. If I could, that would explain much. But I am saying that I’m not made of the stuff to take money for freeing my father from my mother, that my father may gratify his own happiness while mother trims hats in a small-town millinery for a handful of dollars a week. In fact, if it wasn’t coarse, I’d feel like telling you to take your self-pity, your twisted outlook on life, your belated love affair and go to the devil. That’s crude. But it would express the state of my feelings with neatness, conciseness and dispatch.”
Nathan read over the packet of pages he had produced. Then he jogged them with ink-daubed fingers and folded them into an envelope. With a consciousness of good work well executed, he stored the addressed envelope away in his pocket and went back downstairs.
He went out into the city and down Salina Street. He found the all-night Western Union office open.
He despatched a cable to his father—four words.
“Letter received. Not interested.”
He went back to his hotel, ripped his evening’s work to shreds and dropped them in his waste basket.