He remembered his
failures and scrapes in the process of learning. He was that much to the
good, anyway. Later on they would have to begin living life and going
through the mill as he had gone. Very well. While they were busy with
that, he could be learning the other side of life from the books.

As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated Oakland
from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story building along
the front of which ran the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAM'S CASH STORE. Martin
Eden got off at this corner. He stared up for a moment at the sign. It
carried a message to him beyond its mere wording. A personality of
smallness and egotism and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from
the letters themselves. Bernard Higginbotham had married his sister, and
he knew him well. He let himself in with a latch-key and climbed the
stairs to the second floor. Here lived his brother-in-law. The grocery
was below. There was a smell of stale vegetables in the air. As he
groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-cart, left there by
one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and brought up against a door
with a resounding bang. "The pincher," was his thought; "too miserly to
burn two cents' worth of gas and save his boarders' necks."

He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his sister
and Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his trousers, while
his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his feet dangling in
dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the second chair. He
glanced across the top of the paper he was reading, showing a pair of
dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes. Martin Eden never looked at him
without experiencing a sense of repulsion. What his sister had seen in
the man was beyond him. The other affected him as so much vermin, and
always aroused in him an impulse to crush him under his foot. "Some day
I'll beat the face off of him," was the way he often consoled himself for
enduring the man's existence. The eyes, weasel-like and cruel, were
looking at him complainingly.

"Well," Martin demanded. "Out with it."

"I had that door painted only last week," Mr. Higginbotham half whined,
half bullied; "and you know what union wages are. You should be more
careful."

Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of
it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the
wall.