She
felt that now was the time to bring up this subject and dispose of
it.
Said she graciously: "I'm sorry your father and mother aren't
living. I'd like to have known them."
He grew red. He was seeing a tiny, unkempt cottage in the
outskirts of Wayne, poor, even for that modest little town. He was
seeing a bent, gaunt old laborer in jeans, smoking a pipe on the
doorsill; he was seeing, in the kitchen-dining-room-sitting-room-
parlor, disclosed by the open door, a stout, aggressive-looking
laborer's wife in faded calico, doing the few thick china dishes
in dented dishpan on rickety old table. "Yes," said he, with not a
trace of sincerity in his ashamed, constrained voice, "I wish so,
too."
She understood; she felt sorry for him, proud of herself. Was it
not fine and noble of her thus to condescend? "But there are your
brothers and sisters," she went graciously on. "I must meet them
some time." "Yes, some time," said he, laboriously pumping a thin,
watery pretense of enthusiasm into his voice.
She had done her duty by his dreadful, impossible family. She
passed glibly to other subjects. He was glad she had had the
ladylike tact not to look at him during the episode; he wouldn't
have liked any human being to see the look he knew his face was
wearing.
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