e
virile--and noisy--uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil
of wire, pole-climbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel spurs
into the crisp pine wood of the lighting-poles, he carelessly ascended
to the place of humming wires and red cross-bars and green-glass
insulators, while crowds of two and three small boys stared in awe
from below. At such moments Carl did not envy the aristocratic leisure
of his high-school classmate, Fatty Ben Rusk, who, as son of the
leading doctor, did not work, but stayed home and read library books.

Carl's own home was not adapted to the enchantments of a boy's
reading. Perfectly comfortable it was, and clean with the hard
cleanness that keeps oilcloth looking perpetually unused, but it was
so airlessly respectable that it doubled Carl's natural restlessness.
It had been old Oscar Ericson's labor of love, but the carpenter loved
shininess more than space and leisure. His model for a house would
have been a pine dry-goods box grained in imitation of oak. Oscar
Ericson radiated intolerance and a belief in unimaginative, unresting
labor. Every evening, collarless and carpet-slippered, ruffling his
broom-colored hair or stroking his large, long chin, while his
shirt-tab moved ceaselessly in time to his breathing, he read a
Norwegian paper. Carl's mother darned woolen socks and thought about
milk-pans and the neighbors and breakfast. The creak of rockers filled
the unventilated, oilcloth-floored sitting-room. The sound was as
unchanging as the sacred positions of the crayon enlargement of Mrs.
Ericson's father, the green-glass top-hat for matches, or the violent
ingrain rug with its dog's-head pattern.

Carl's own room contained only plaster walls, a narrow wooden bed, a
bureau, a kitchen chair. Fifteen minutes in this irreproachable home
sent Carl off to Eddie Klemm's billiard-parlor, which was not
irreproachable.

He rather disliked the bitterness of beer and the acrid specks of
cigarette tobacco that stuck to his lips, but the "bunch at Eddie's"
were among the few people in Joralemon who were conscious of life.
Eddie's establishment was a long, white-plastered room with a
pressed-steel ceiling and an unswept floor. On the walls were
billiard-table-makers' calendars and a collection of cigarette-premium
chromos portraying bathing girls. The girls were of lithographic
complexions, almost too perfect of feature, and their lips were more
than ruby. Carl admired them.