One other topic flamed these poor souls, seeking to kindle a warmth of sympathy for their failures.  When the lamentations ceased, they talked of flight.  Fred Starratt sat mentally apart and listened.  Everybody had a plan.  They discussed prospects, previous attempts, chances for failure.  Fred learned, among other things, that the search for escaped nationals did not extend much beyond the environs of Fairview.  If a man from Ward 6 made a good get-away he held his freedom, unless his kinsfolk constituted themselves a pack of moral bloodhounds.  He realized now that there was nothing as relentless as family pride.  It was not so much the alcoholic excess that was resented, but the fact that it led to unkept linen and dirty finger nails and, by the same token, to neighborhood scorn.  Concern for a man’s soul did not send him to Fairview...  But was anybody really concerned for a man’s soul? ...  Why should they be? ...  He ended by quarreling only with the pretense.

Escape!  Escape!  To get back to the world that they were forever reviling!  Like men in the grip of some wanton mistress who could bring them neither happiness nor heroics, either in her company or away from her.  Take Fordham, for instance, a lean, purple-faced clerk, who had been sent up for the third time by his wife after two sensational escapes.  He hadn’t disturbed her, looked her up, gone near her, in fact.  But he had laid up alongside an amber-filled bottle in a moldy wine shop somewhere near the Barbary coast.  Yes, he had achieved it even in the face of prohibition.  And she had got wind of it.  Folks had seen him, red-eyed and greasy-coated and bilious-hued, emerging from his haunt in some harsh noon that set him blinking, like a startled owl.  Well, she couldn’t quite have that, you know!  She couldn’t have her husband making a spectacle of himself, sinking lower and lower in the hell of his own choosing.  No!  Far better to pick out a hell for him ... a hell removed discreetly from the gaze of the scornful. ...  And there was Wainright, who, like Monet, had a father.  He had married a Runway Girl of the Bearcat Follies ... the sort that patters down from the stage to imprint carmine kisses and embarrassment upon the shining pate of the first old rounder that has an aisle seat.  Well, father could not have that, either.  He was impatient with the whole performance.  Indeed, a less impatient man would have waited and watched Wainright, junior, wind himself in the net which his own hands had set.  Instead, he went to the trouble of digging a pit for his son which hastened the inevitable, but did not cure the folly...  Wainright had escaped, too, quite casually, one fine spring day when he had been sent out to the barn to help milk the cows.  The Runway Girl, in need of publicity, had telegraphed the details to her press agent, following receipt of her husband’s letter telling of his exploit.  A Runway Girl whose husband-lover broke jail, so to speak, for her, had professional assets that could not be gainsaid.