There was a tom-tom to the silence against her beating ear drums.

"All right, son," she said, pulling her lips until they smiled at him,
"with Leo and Irma that'll only make six of us, then."

He kissed her, but so tiredly that again it was almost her irresistible
woman's impulse to drag down that fiercely black head to the beating
width of her bosom and plead from him drop by drop some of the bitter
welling of pain she could see in his eyes.

"Nicky," she started to cry, and then, at his straightening back from
her, "come out in the dining room after I pack off the men. I got my
work to do. That nix of a house girl left last night. Such sass, too!
I'm better off doing my work alone."

Sara, poor dear, could not keep a servant, and, except for the
instigation of her husband and son, preferred not to. Cooks rebelled
at the exactitude of her household and her disputative reign of the
kitchen.

"I'll be out presently, mother," he said, and flung himself down in the
leather Morris chair, lighting his pipe and ostensibly settling down to
the open-faced volume of _Criminal Law_.

Sara straightened a straight chair. She knew, almost as horridly as
if she had looked in on it, the mucky thing that was happening; the
intuitive sixth sense of her hovered over him with great wings that
wanted to spread. Josie Drew was no surmise with her. The blond head and
the red hat were tatooed in pain on her heart and she trembled in a bath
of fear, and, trembling, smiled and went out.

Sitting there while the morning ticked on, head thrown back, eyes
closed, and all the little darting nerves at him, the dawn of Nicholas
Turkletaub's repugnance was all for self. The unfrowsy room, and himself
fresh from his own fresh sheets. His mother's eyes with that clean-sky
quality in them. The affectionate wrangling of those two decent voices
from the dining room. Books! His books, that he loved. His tastiest
dream of mother, with immensity and grandeur in her eyes, listening
from a privileged first-row bench to the supreme quality of his mercy.
_Judge_--Turkletaub!

But tastily, too, and undeniably against his lips, throughout these
conjurings, lay the last crushy kiss of Josie Drew. That swany arch to
her neck as he bent it back. He had kissed her there. Countlessly.

He tried to dwell on his aversions for her. She had once used an
expletive in his presence that had sickened him, and, noting its effect,
she had not reiterated. The unfastid