“I believed that sticking by my wife—when I’d given her a child—was the right and proper thing to do. Men usually are sports that way.”
“More conceit! So you’re a sport, are you—along with being eligible to an especial halo for decency? As if anything could offset sleeping—even for one night!—with a woman who was not your ideal and your princess! It just goes to show where your self-respect is! You haven’t any! You never had any self-respect! If you’d had any self-respect you never would have permitted your father to bamboozle you as he did! Oh, what a dirty little cad you are! And you talk of decency!”
Nathan was beginning to lose his sense of proportion; he was getting muddled trying to follow Bernie’s logic.
“All I’ve had to go by is experience, what I’ve been taught, what I’ve contacted,” he blurted out. “If I did wrong it was because I didn’t know any better!”
“And here I am, trying to show you wherein you’re wrong, like a sincere friend, or a woman who loves you—and you sit there in all your small-town boorishness and bigotry and conceit and try to defend yourself! Faugh!”
Nathan, ever supersensitive, began to wonder how far Bernie was right and how far wrong. And the woman’s continued tirade did nothing to enlighten him:
“Hasn’t it dawned on you,” she cried, her voice strained with hysteria, “why you’ve never gotten on in the world—why at twenty-seven you’re no further along than you were at seventeen? I’ll tell you! It’s because you’ve never been able to see yourself as others see you! You’re a boob! A hick! A sentimental little small-town vulgarian. And I bet at table you eat with your knife and blow your coffee in a saucer! No wonder you haven’t got ahead. Hasn’t there ever been a time when opportunity opened for you and then—when people you met saw you—that opportunity mysteriously closed? Answer me! Hasn’t there?”
At once into poor Nathan’s distraught brain came the experience of the New York knitting-mills management. His acknowledgment showed plainly on his bewildered face.
“Ah! I thought so!” cried Bernie exultantly. “And why did you lose that opportunity? Because you were a hick! Because you didn’t know how to act! Because you probably deported yourself before fine-grained, well-bred people the way you’ve been deporting yourself in my house to-night—like a savage who pads around naked before his family and tears his food apart with his fingers! That’s why you’ve never gotten ahead and you never will! You’re small-town, I say! You’re rube and hick! A vulgarian! And a rotter beside!”
Nathan stared blankly ahead of him. Was he? He almost began to think that he was.