Jimmie did not say anything for a while. At last, in a quiet, thin voice, he began:
“I dimly remember, Mother, that when Elsie Mac-something—of this town—married Leonard Zimm you helped engineer the whole business. You were fond of Len—”
“The Zimms,” his mother answered, “have lived in this country for five generations. They came with the pioneers. We accepted them, in time, naturally. In those days.”
“What do you mean, “in those days’? Aren’t the Zimms still around?”
“No, James. They moved, more than a year ago. To Chicago.”
Jimmie hopped to his feet. “So that’s it! Sarah didn’t tell me, the louse! She gave him up—when she found out the truth!”
Mrs. Bailey looked at her tall son with eyes that gleamed oddly. “Sarah gave him up. Naturally.”
He slapped his book together. “Fine business! I think I’ll go down to the lab for the night. I don’t want to hear, Mother, about how the Jews, a little minority of them in every nation, have succeeded—although they are an admittedly inferior people!—in stealing all the money and the power from us big, bold, better gentiles, and making suckers out of us in business, and finally in so befuddling our mighty minds that they have destroyed the ninety-five per cent of us, sacked our civilization, and thrust us into war. Phooie, on you! I knew you and Dad were pretty nuts, Mother! This is the first intimation I’ve had, though, that you were feasting on the bloody knuckles of people who can’t protest, even, without causing a fresh hundred of their relatives to hang by their thumbs and their breasts. God damn it! I can’t stand it!” He went out.
Hard on the heels of that episode, came another—and then another. The first was minor, but it distressed Jimmie. The second was more bitter.
On the day after he had stalked away from his mother’s intolerance, with the hot belief that Sarah had been a traitor to her man, he called on Biff. He was beginning to like Biff, to feel that his brother had a soul. It was a young soul, wounded and arrogant, but susceptible of maturation. It needed care. Jimmie believed that Biff was caring for it, as he lay on his monotonous bed, thinking slow thoughts about his life, and reading long books about the realities around him.