lammed an impression
into your head as though he had yelled it at you.

But to be fair to Vincent, Mr. Welles thought probably he had been more
than ready to soak up an impression like the one he felt. They'd had
such an awfully good time with Mrs. Crittenden and the children, it
stood to reason the head of the house would seem to them like a
butter-in and an outsider in a happy-family group.

More than this, too. As they came within hearing of the industrial
activity of the mill, and he felt his heart sink and turn sore and
bitter, Mr. Welles realized that Vincent had very little to do with his
dread of meeting the mill-owner. It was not Mr. Crittenden he shrank
from, it was the mill-owner, the business man . . . business itself.

Mr. Welles hated and feared the sound of the word and knew that it had
him cowed, because in his long life he had known it to be the only
reality in the world of men. And in that world he had known the only
reality to be that if you didn't cut the other fellow's throat first he
would cut yours. There wasn't any other reality. He had heard
impractical, womanish men say there was, and try to prove it, only to
have their economic throats cut considerably more promptly than any
others. He had done his little indirect share of the throat-cutting
always. He was not denying the need to do it. Only he had never found it
a very cheerful atmosphere in which to pass one's life. And now he had
escaped, to the only other reality, the pleasant, gentle, slightly
unreal world of women, nice women, and children and gardens. He was so
old now that there was no shame in his sinking into that for what time
he had left, as other old fellows sank into an easy-chair. Only he
wished that he could have got along without being reminded so vividly,
as he would be by this trip to the business-world, of what paid for the
arm-chair, supported the nice women and children. He wished he hadn't
had to come here, to be forced to remember again that the inevitable
foundation for all that was pleasant and livable in private life was the
grim determination on the part of a strong man to give his strength to
"taking it out of the hide" of his competitors, his workmen, and the
public. He'd had a vacation from that, and it made him appallingly
depressed to take another dose of it now. He sincerely wished that sweet
Mrs. Crittenden were a widow with a small income from some impersonal
source with no uncomfortable human associations