thin neck would turn crimson and that he would have a stroke.

"To sit in a stuffy room," I began, "to copy, to compete with a
typewriter, is shameful and humiliating for a man of my age. What
can the sacred fire have to do with it?"

"It's intellectual work, anyway," said my father. "But that's enough;
let us cut short this conversation, and in any case I warn you: if
you don't go back to your work again, but follow your contemptible
propensities, then my daughter and I will banish you from our hearts.
I shall strike you out of my will, I swear by the living God!"

With perfect sincerity to prove the purity of the motives by which
I wanted to be guided in all my doings, I said:

"The question of inheritance does not seem very important to me. I
shall renounce it all beforehand."

For some reason or other, quite to my surprise, these words were
deeply resented by my father. He turned crimson.

"Don't dare to talk to me like that, stupid!" he shouted in a thin,
shrill voice. "Wastrel!" and with a rapid, skilful, and habitual
movement he slapped me twice in the face. "You are forgetting
yourself."

When my father beat me as a child I had to stand up straight, with
my hands held stiffly to my trouser seams, and look him straight
in the face. And now when he hit me I was utterly overwhelmed, and,
as though I were still a child, drew myself up and tried to look