swine!” he screamed suddenly, and he struck the evil face away from him.
Then, as Steve sprawled dazed and witless on the floor, Luke sprang upon him with stammering curse, and, past reason, began to drag him up and down. And Eugene sprang upon Luke to stop him, and all three stammered and cursed and begged and accused, while the roomers huddled at the door, and Eliza wept, calling for help, and Daisy, who was up from the South with her children, wrung her plump hands, moaning “Oh, they’ll kill him! They’ll kill him. Have mercy on me and my poor little children, I beg of you.”
Then the shame, the disgust, the maudlin grievance, the weeping women, the excited men.
“You m-m-m-miserable degenerate!” cried Luke. “You c-c-came home because you thought p-p-p-papa would die and leave you a little money. You d-d-don’t deserve a penny!”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Steve screamed in an agony of suspicion. “You’re all against me! You’ve framed up on me and you’re trying to beat me out of my share.”
He was weeping with genuine rage and fear, with the angry suspicion of a beaten child. Eugene looked at him with pity and nausea: he was so foul, whipped, and frightened. Then, with a sense of unreal horror and disbelief, he listened while they bawled out their accusations. This disease of money and greed tainted other people, the people in books, not one’s own. They were snarling like curs over one bone—their little shares in the money of an unburied dead man who lay, with low moanings of disease, not thirty feet away.
The family drew off in two camps of hostile watchfulness: Helen and Luke on one side and Daisy and Steve, subdued but stubborn, on the other. Eugene, who had no talent for parties, cruised through sidereal space with momentary anchorings to earth. He loafed along the avenue, and lounged in Wood’s; he gossiped with the pharmacy rakes; he courted the summer girls on boarding-house porches; he visited Roy Brock in a high mountain village, and lay with a handsome girl in the forest; he went to South Carolina; he was seduced by a dentist’s wife at Dixieland. She was a prim ugly woman of forty-three, who wore glasses
