"Papa, when Deleah and I want our hats and dresses for the spring, what are we to do?" she asked her father, with that note of aggression in her voice with which he had become familiar from her.
"Do? Go without them," he promptly replied.
"You know very well we can't go without clothes, papa."
"Then go to the devil," papa said, and getting up slouched from the room.
Bernard, too, who was more afraid of the altered man than Bessie, and for long shrank from any conversation with him, was at last induced by his mother to consult his father as to his own future.
"There isn't much use that I can see, sir, in my sweating away at my books for this exam," he said.
"Supposing that I get through it, what am I to do then?"
"You must do the best you can. This Senior Cambridge Exam, they tell me, is a door to any of the professions."
"But you want money to enter a profession, sir. From what I hear we have none."
"Your hearing has not played you false in that direction. What I had you managed to spend, among you. I was the goose that laid the golden egg; now circumstances forbid my laying any more--for a time. You must look after yourselves."
"But if you could only give us some idea of how to set about it."
Then, upon him, too, his father, having shown a greater measure of forbearance so far than he accorded the mere women of his family, turned savagely. The poor wretch did not know how to help them, did not know what to advise them to do: to frighten them was his only resource.
"Haven't I got enough to think about?" he shouted at the boy. "You and your mother and sisters come and badger--and badger me--"
"All right, sir. I won't badger you any more."
"All I ask is to be let alone--to be granted a little peace. You have no mercy--none!"
But after that conversation the boy gave up even the pretence of studying. "Where's the good?" he asked of Bessie. "If I passed the blessed thing, where's the good? I shall have to be an errand boy, I suppose, or sweep a crossing. I don't want a Senior Cambridge Certificate for that."
The womankind did their best to persuade him to persevere, but he declared that he could not study in his bedroom without a fire, nor could he so much as drive a word into his head if he had to sit in the same room as his father.