contend with I was afraid
to tell you, for fear--for fear--"

"Now, now, Mamma, is that the way to cry your eyes out about nothing? I
don't say I'm not sometimes hasty--"

"Time and time again--keeping it in from you--after the Chinese laundry
that night after you--you whipped him so--you never knew the months of
nights with him afterward--when I found out he liked that--stuff! Me
alone with him--"

"Sara, is now time to rake up such ten-year-old nonsense!"

"It's all coming out in me now, Mosher. The strain. You never knew. That
time you had to send me to the Catskills for the baths. You thought
it was rheumatism. I knew what was the matter with me. Worry. The
nights--Mosher. He liked it. I found it hid away in the toes of his
gymnasium shoes and in the mouth to his bugle. He--liked that stuff,
Mosher. You didn't know that, did you?"

"Liked what?"

"It. The--the stuff from the Chinese laundry. Even after the Juvenile
Court, when you thought it was all over after the whipping that night.
He'd snuff it up. I found him twice on his bed after school. All
druggy-like--half sleeping and half laughing. The gang at school he was
in with--learned him--"

"You mean--?"

"It ain't so easy to undo with a day in Juvenile Court such a habit like
that. You thought the court was the finish. My fight just began then!"

"Why, Sara!"

"You remember the time he broke his kneecap and how I fighted the
doctors against the hypodermic and you got so mad because I wouldn't let
him have it to ease the pain. I knew why it was better he should suffer
than have it. _I knew!_ It was a long fight I had with him alone,
Mosher. He liked that--stuff."

"That--don't--seem possible."

"And that wasn't the only lead-pipe case that time, neither, Mosher.
Twice I had to lay out of my own pocket so you wouldn't know, and talk
to him 'til sometimes I thought I didn't have any more tears left
inside of me. Between you and your business worries that year of the
garment-workers' strike--and our boy--I--after all that I haven't got
the strength left. Now that he's come out of it big, I can't begin over
again. I haven't got what he would call the second wind for it. If
anything should keep him now from going straight ahead to make him count
as a citizen, I wouldn't have the strength left to fight it, Mosher.
Wouldn't!"

And so Sara Turkletaub lay back with the ripple writing of stormy high
tides crawling out in wrinkles all over her face and her