the Westinghouse plant at Pittsburgh after Helen’s marriage.
Gant still occupied his sitting-room, but the rest of the house he had rented to a sprightly gray-haired widow of forty. She looked after them beautifully, but she served Ben with an especial tenderness. At night, on the cool veranda, Eugene would find them below the ripening clusters, hear the quiet note of his brother’s voice, his laugh, see the slow red arc of his cigarette in darkness.
The quiet one was more quiet and morose than he had ever been before: he stalked through the house scowling ferociously. All his conversation with Eliza was short and bitterly scornful; with Gant he spoke hardly at all. They had never talked together. Their eyes never met—a great shame, the shame of father and son, that mystery that goes down beyond motherhood, beyond life, that mysterious shame that seals the lips of all men, and lives in their hearts, had silenced them.
But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever before. As they sat upon their beds at night, reading and smoking before they slept, all of the pain and bitterness of Benjamin Gant’s life burst out in violent denunciation. He began to speak with slow sullen difficulty, halting over his words as he did when he read, but speaking more rapidly as his quiet voice became more passionate.
“I suppose they’ve told you how poor they are?” he began, tossing his cigarette away.
“Well,” said Eugene, “I’ve got to go easy. I mustn’t waste my money.”
“Ah-h!” said Ben, making an ugly face. He laughed silently, with a thin and bitter contortion of his lips.
“Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way through college by waiting on tables and so on. Perhaps I can do something like that.”
Ben turned over on his side until he faced his brother, propping himself on his thin hairy forearm.
“Now listen,’Gene,” he said sternly, “don’t be a damned little fool, do you hear? You take every damn cent you can get out of them,” he added savagely.
“Well, I appreciate what they’re doing. I’m getting a lot more than the rest of you had. They’re doing a lot
