rom a steam laundry. Hot, stifling air.
Bernice didn't work in the laundry but she wished that she did so that
the hot air would kill her. She wanted to be stifled. She needed torture
to be happy. She also needed a good swift clout on the side of the face.

A drunken man lurched out from a door-way and flung his arms about her.
It was only her husband. She loved her husband. She loved him so much
that, as she pushed him away and into the gutter, she stuck her little
finger into his eye. She also untied his neck-tie. It was a bow
neck-tie, with white, dirty spots on it and it was wet with gin. It
didn't seem as if Bernice could stand it any longer. All the repressions
of nineteen sordid years behind protruding teeth surged through her
untidy soul. She wanted love. But it was not her husband that she loved
so fiercely. It was old Grandfather Twilly. And he was too dead.

PART 3

In the dining-room of the Twillys' house everything was very quiet. Even
the vinegar-cruet which was covered with fly-specks. Grandma Twilly lay
with her head in the baked potatoes, poisoned by Mabel, who, in her turn
had been poisoned by her husband and sprawled in an odd posture over the
china-closet. Wilbur and his sister Bernice had just finished choking
each other to death and between them completely covered the carpet in
that corner of the room where the worn spot showed the bare boards
beneath, like ribs on a chicken carcass. Only the baby survived. She had
a mean face and had great spillings of Imperial Granum down her bib. As
she looked about her at her family, a great hate surged through her tiny
body and her eyes snapped viciously. She wanted to get down from her
high-chair and show them all how much she hated them.

Bernice's husband, the man who came after the waste paper, staggered
into the room. The tips were off both his shoe-lacings. The baby
experienced a voluptuous sense of futility at the sight of the
tipless-lacings and leered suggestively at her uncle-in-law.

"We must get the roof fixed," said the man, very quietly. "It lets the
sun in."

III

THIS CHILD KNOWS THE ANSWER--DO YOU?

We are occasionally confronted in the advertisements by the picture of
an offensively bright-looking little boy, fairly popping with
information, who, it is claimed in the text, knows all the inside dope
on why fog forms in beads on a woolen coat, how long it would take to
crawl to the moon on your hands and knees, and what makes