n out of order. He had not quite settled the bill for
these repairs. He realized it always as an actual physical incubus
upon his slender, bowed shoulders. He came of a race who were
impatient of debt, and who regarded with proud disdain all gratuitous
benefits from their fellow-men. Henry always walked a long route from
the shop in order to avoid passing the houses of the doctor and the
carpenter whom he owed.

Once he had saved a little money; that was twenty-odd years before;
but he had invested it foolishly, and lost every cent. That
transaction he regarded with hatred, both of himself and of the
people who had advised him to risk and lose his hard-earned dollars.
The small sum which he had lost had come to assume colossal
proportions in his mind. He used, in his bitterest moments, to reckon
up on a scrap of paper what it might have amounted to, if it had been
put out at interest, by this time. He always came out a rich man, by
his calculations, if it had not been for that unwise investment. He
often told his wife Sylvia that they might have been rich people if
it had not been for that; that he would not have been tied to a
shoe-shop, nor she have been obliged to work so hard.

Sylvia took a boarder--the high-school principal, Horace Allen--and
she also made jellies and cakes, and baked bread for those in East
Westland who could afford to pay for such instead of doing the work
themselves. She was a delicate woman, and Henry knew that she worked
beyond her strength, and the knowledge filled him with impotent fury.
Since the union had come into play he did not have to work so many
hours in the shop, and he got the same pay, but he worked as hard,
because he himself cultivated his bit of land. He raised vegetables
for the table. He also made the place gay with flowers to please
Sylvia and himself. He had a stunted thirst for beauty.

In the winter he found plenty to do in the extra hours. He sawed wood
in his shed by the light of a lantern hung on a peg. He also did what
odd jobs he could for neighbors. He picked up a little extra money in
that way, but he worked very hard. Sometimes he told Sylvia that he
didn't know but he worked harder than he had done when the shop time
was longer. However, he had been one of the first to go, heart and
soul, with the union, and he had paid his dues ungrudgingly, even
with a fierce satisfaction, as if in some way the transaction made
him even with his millionaire employers. There