decline.

There was one subject she had always avoided with him--the subject
of his family. He had not exactly avoided it, indeed, had spoken
occasionally of his brothers and sisters, their wives and
husbands, their children. But his reference to these humble
persons, so far removed from the station to which he had ascended,
had impressed her as being dragged in by the ears, as if he were
forcing himself to pretend to himself and to her that he was not
ashamed of them, when in reality he could not but be ashamed. She
felt that now was the time to bring up this subject and dispose of
it.

Said she graciously: "I'm sorry your father and mother aren't
living. I'd like to have known them."

He grew red. He was seeing a tiny, unkempt cottage in the
outskirts of Wayne, poor, even for that modest little town. He was
seeing a bent, gaunt old laborer in jeans, smoking a pipe on the
doorsill; he was seeing, in the kitchen-dining-room-sitting-room-
parlor, disclosed by the open door, a stout, aggressive-looking
laborer's wife in faded calico, doing the few thick china dishes
in dented dishpan on rickety old table. "Yes," said he, with not a
trace of sincerity in his ashamed, constrained voice, "I wish so,
too."

She understood; she felt sorry for him, proud of herself. Was it
not fine and noble of her thus to condescend? "But there are your
brothers and sisters," she went graciously on. "I must meet them
some time." "Yes, some time," said he, laboriously pumping a thin,