Short Stories
steaming cloth stream.
He had become a man very early in life. At seven, when he
drew his first wages, began his adolescence. A certain feeling of
independence crept up in him, and the relationship between him
and his mother changed. Somehow, as an earner and breadwin-
ner, doing his own work in the world, he was more like an equal
with her. Manhood, full-blown manhood, had come when he
was eleven, at which time he had gone to work on the night shift
for six months. No child works on the night shift and remains a
child.
There had been several great events in his life. One of these
had been when his mother bought some California prunes. Two
others had been the two times when she cooked custard. Those
had been events. He remembered them kindly. And at that time
his mother had told him of a blissful dish she would sometime
make—"floating island," she had called it, "better than custard."
For years he had looked forward to the day when he would sit
down to the table with floating island before him, until at last he
had relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals.
Once he found a silver quarter lying on the sidewalk. That,
also, was a great event in his life, withal a tragic one. He knew
his duty on the instant the silver flashed on his eyes, before even
he had picked it up. At home, as usual, there was not enough to
eat, and home he should have taken it as he did his wages every
Saturday night. Right conduct in this case was obvious; but he
never had any spending of his money, and he was suffering
from candy hunger. He was ravenous for the sweets that only on
red-letter days he had ever tasted in his life.
He did not attempt to deceive himself. He knew it was sin,
34