“Don’t count on me, dear.  I won’t be home for supper.”

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 unfastidious brunette roots to her light hair.  That sink with the grease-rimmed old beer!  But then:  her eyes where the brows slid down to make them heavy-lidded.  That bit of blue vein in the crotch of her elbow.  That swany arch.

Back somewhere, as the tidy morning wore in, the tranced, the maddening repetition began to tick itself through: