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“Well, you don’t have to laugh at your parents,” said Mrs. Felman, with an air of pin-pricked dignity. “You never did show any respect for us, in spite of all that we’ve done for you. Never.”

“Say, Carrie, you’ll have to get a suit for him. Something cheap, you know, at Pearlman’s,” said the father. “He’ll never get a job in those rags of his.”

“Money, money,” said Mrs. Felman in a mechanically mournful voice. “All I do is spend money. It’s terrible.”

The sound of an opening door invaded the flat tom-tom of their talk.

“It’s Al Levy,” said Mrs. Felman, with fear in her voice. “It would be a shame now if he saw Carl in this condition. Hurry, hurry, Carl, to the bathroom before he comes in here. Your father’s razor is on the shelf and I’ll get you a clean shirt from the ones you left behind. Maybe they still fit you, as I was always careful to buy them a size too large.”

Carl felt like an ignoble marionette who was being hastily mended behind the curtain for fear that he might cast ridicule upon the sleekly vacant play, and his emotions were evenly divided between amusement and contempt. Driving his heart and mind into a fitting blankness, he closed the bathroom door. Levy had a room in the Felman apartment and they treated him with an unctuous respect that almost verged upon an Oriental self-abasement. He was a man of twenty-six who worked for a wealthy uncle, received a large salary, and polished and scrubbed the limited essentials of a semi-professional man-about-town, with minor chorus girls and gamblers helping him to flatter microscopically the fatigue donated by his daily labors.