manner was also touched by a quality that was resigned and somewhat mocking—with a mockery which seemed to be directed toward herself more than toward anyone, as if in the physical presence of the boy she saw the visible proof and living evidence of her folly, the bitter fruit of the days of innocence, love, and guileless belief, and as if she was conscious that a joke had been played on both her and her child. And the boy seemed to understand and accept this feeling with a sharp correspondence of feeling, almost incredible in a child. And yet they did not hate each other: their conversations were cynically wise and impersonal and yet curiously honest and respectful. She would look at him for a moment with an air of cold and casual detachment, and that faint smile of mockery when, on one of her visits home, he would come in, panting and dishevelled, a tough and impish urchin, from the street.
“Come here, you,” she would say at length, quietly, harshly. “Whatcha been doin’to yourself?” she would ask, in the same hard tone, as deftly she straightened and re-knotted his tie, smoothed out his rumpled sheaf of oaken-coloured hair. “You look as if yuh just crawled out of someone’s ash-can.”
“Ah!” he said in his tough, high city-urchin’s voice, “a coupla guys tried to get wise wit’me an’I socked one of’em. Dat’s all!”
“Oh-ho-ho-ho!”—Abe turned his grey grinning face prayerfully to heaven and laughed softly, painfully.
“Fightin”, huh?“ said Sylvia.”Do you remember what I told you last time?“ she said in a warning tone.”If I catch yuh fightin’again there’s goin’to be no more ball games. You’ll stay home next time."
“Ah!” he cried again in a high protesting tone. “What’s a guy gonna do? Do you t’ink I’m gonna let a coupla mugs like dat get away wit’moidah?”
“Oh-ho-ho-ho!” cried Abe, lifting his great nose prayerfully again; then with a sudden shift to reproof and admonition, he said sternly: “What kind of talk do you call that? Huh? Didn’t I tell you not to say’mugs’?”
“Ah, what’s a guy gonna say?” cried Jimmy. “I neveh could loin all dem big woids, noway.”
“My God! I wish you’d listen to’m,” his mother said in a tone of hard and weary resignation. “I suppose that’s what I’m sendin’him to school for! 'Loin, woids, noway, t’ink! Is that the way to talk?” she demanded harshly. “Is that what they teach yuh?”
