“What?”
“Get a gun and shoot him!”
“Precisely! Why didn’t you? Don’t you suppose that if you’d found a shotgun and peppered his hide with holes, the big, hypocritical, child-mauling bully wouldn’t have had a new respect for you and left you alone?”
“But suppose I’d killed him?”
“Well, suppose you had? Wouldn’t it have been what he deserved?”
“But, Bernie! Be reasonable! You’re not advising a boy to get a gun and commit murder? Where would I have ended? In the electric chair or on the gallows.”
“They don’t hang children!”
“But do you think it would be pleasant to go through the rest of life with the realization that I’d shot my own father?”
“If you were justified—as you were!—there would have been no remorse. Besides, if you had been hounded by remorse, it just goes to show you’ve got a clinging, messy, sentimental mind!”
Nathan had a feeling that he was talking to some one who was not quite rational. Still, he was accustomed to dealing with irrational people—especially, The Sex.