“If I’d only had half a chance!” would escape him.

This was a phrase borrowed unconsciously from his mother.  She was never bitter nor resentful at their profitless tilt with fortune except as it had reacted on her son.

“You should have gone to college,” she used to insist, regretfully, summing up by implication his lack of advancement.  At first he took a measure of comfort in her excuse; later he came to be irritated by it.  And in moments of truant self-candor he admitted he could have made the grade with concessions to pride.  There were plenty of youths who worked their way through.  But he always had moved close to the edge of affluent circles, where he had caught the cold but disturbing glow of their standards.  He left high school with pallid ideals of gentility, ideals that expressed themselves in his reasons for deciding to enter an insurance office.  Insurance, he argued, was a nice business, one met nice people, one had nice hours, one was placed in nice surroundings.  He had discovered later that one drew a nice salary, too.  Well, at least, he had had the virtue of choosing without a very keen eye for the financial returns.

Ten years of being married to a woman who demanded a nice home and nice clothes and a circle of nice friends had done a great deal toward making him a little skeptical about the soundness of his standards.  But his moments of uncertainty were few and fleeting, called into life by such uncomfortable circumstances as touching old Wetherbee for money or putting his tailor off when the date for his monthly dole fell due.  He had never been introspective enough to quite place himself in the social scale, but when, in his thought or conversation, he referred to people of the better class he unconsciously included himself.  He was not a drunken, disorderly, or radical member of society, and he didn’t black boots, or man a ship, or sell people groceries, or do any of the things that were done in overalls and a soft shirt, therefore it went without saying that he belonged to the better class.  That was synonymous with admitting that one kept one’s ringer nails clean and used a pocket handkerchief.

Suddenly, with the force of a surprise slap in the face, it had been borne in upon him that he was not any of the fine things he imagined.  He was sure that his insolent guest, Hilmer, had not meant to be disagreeable at the moment when he had said: 

“Stiffening the backbone of the middle class is next to impossible!”

“The middle class”!  The phrase had brought up even Helen Starratt with a round turn.  One might have called them both peasants with equal temerity.  No, Hilmer had not made that point consciously, and therein lay its sting.