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“You got to remember, Mr. Abercrombie, that we haven’t had the money down here since the war

Abercrombie waved this impatiently aside.

“Oh, I’ve heard all that,” he said, “and I’m tired of it. And I’ve heard the South lambasted till I’m tired of that, too. It’s not taking France and Germany fifty years to get on their feet, and their war made your war look like a little fracas up an alley. And it’s not your fault and it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just that this is too damn hot to be a white man’s country and it always will be. I’d like to see ’em pack two or three of these states full of darkies and drop ’em out of the Union.”

Hemmick nodded, thoughtfully, though without thought. He had never thought; for over twenty years he had seldom ever held opinions, save the opinions of the local press or of some majority made articulate through passion. There was a certain luxury in thinking that he had never been able to afford. When cases were set before him he either accepted them outright, if they were comprehensible to him, or rejected them if they required a modicum of concentration. Yet he was not a stupid man. He was poor and busy and tired and there were no ideas at large in his community, even had he been capable of grasping them. The idea that he did not think would have been equally incomprehensible to him. He was a closed book, half full of badly printed, uncorrelated trash.

Just now, his reaction to Abercrombie’s assertion was exceedingly simple. Since the remarks proceeded from a man who was a Southerner by birth, who was successful — moreover, who was confident and decisive and persuasive and suave — he was inclined to accept them without suspicion or resentment.

He took one of Abercrombie’s cigars and pulling on it, still with a stern imitation of profundity upon his tired face, watched the color glide out of the sky and the gray veils come down. The little boy and his bicycle, the baby, the nursemaid, the forlorn kitten, all had departed. In the stucco bungalows pianos gave out hot, weary notes that inspired the crickets to competitive sound, and squeaky gramophones filled in the intervals with patches of whining ragtime until the impression was created that each living room in the street opened directly out into the darkness.

“What I want to find out,” Abercrombie was saying with a frown, “is why I didn’t have sense enough to know that this was a worthless town. It was entirely an accident that I left here, an utterly blind chance, and as it happened, the very train that took me away was full of luck for me. The man I sat beside gave me my start in life.” His tone became resentful. “But I thought this was all right. I’d have stayed except that I’d gotten into a scrape down at the high school — I got expelled and my daddy told me he didn’t want me at home any more. Why didn’t I know the place wasn’t any good? Why I didn’t see?”

“Well, you’d probably never known anything better?” suggested Hemmick mildly.

“That wasn’t any excuse,” insisted Abercrombie. “If I’d been any good I’d have known. As a matter of fact — as — a — matter — of — fact,” he repeated slowly, “I think that at heart I was the sort of boy who’d have lived and died here happily and never known there was anything better.” He turned to Hemmick with a look almost of distress. “It worries me to think that my — that what’s happened to me can be ascribed to chance. But that’s the sort of boy I think I was. I didn’t start off with the Dick Whittington idea — I started off by accident.”

After this confession he stared out into the twilight with a dejected expression that Hemmick could not understand. It was impossible for the latter to share any sense of the importance of such a distinction — in fact, from a man of Abercrombie’s position it struck him as unnecessarily trivial. Still, he felt that some manifestation of acquiescence was only polite.