A drunken man lurched out from a door-way and flung his arms about her.  It was only her husband.  She loved her husband.  She loved him so much that, as she pushed him away and into the gutter, she stuck her little finger into his eye.  She also untied his neck-tie.  It was a bow neck-tie, with white, dirty spots on it and it was wet with gin.  It didn’t seem as if Bernice could stand it any longer.  All the repressions of nineteen sordid years behind protruding teeth surged through her untidy soul.  She wanted love.  But it was not her husband that she loved so fiercely.  It was old Grandfather Twilly.  And he was too dead.

PART 3

In the dining-room of the Twillys’ house everything was very quiet.  Even the vinegar-cruet which was covered with fly-specks.  Grandma Twilly lay with her head in the baked potatoes, poisoned by Mabel, who, in her turn had been poisoned by her husband and sprawled in an odd posture over the china-closet.  Wilbur and his sister Bernice had just finished choking each other to death and between them completely covered the carpet in that corner of the room where the worn spot showed the bare boards beneath, like ribs on a chicken carcass.  Only the baby survived.  She had a mean face and had great spillings of Imperial Granum down her bib.  As she looked about her at her family, a great hate surged through her tiny body and her eyes snapped viciously.  She wanted to get down from her high-chair and show them all how much she hated them.

Bernice’s husband, the man who came after the waste paper, staggered into the room.  The tips were off both his shoe-lacings.  The baby experienced a voluptuous sense of futility at the sight of the tipless-lacings and leered suggestively at her uncle-in-law.

“We must get the roof fixed,” said the man, very quietly.  “It lets the sun in.”

III

This child knows the answer—­do you?

We are occasionally confronted in the advertisements by the picture of an offensively bright-looking little boy, fairly popping with information, who, it is claimed in the text, knows all the inside dope on why fog forms in beads on a woolen coat, how long it would take to crawl to the moon on your hands and knees, and what makes oysters so quiet.

The taunting catch-line of the advertisement is:  “This Child Knows the Answer—­Do You?” and the idea is to shame you into buying a set of books containing answers to all the questions in the world except the question “Where is the money coming from to buy the books?”

Any little boy knowing all these facts would unquestionably be an asset in a business which specialized in fog-beads or lunar transportation novelties, but he would be awful to have about the house.