Although she saw that he was disinclined to talk (he could so easily, with the opening she had given him, explain that he had not always been a poor, shabby man, but that in Germany, he had been of a well-to-do family), she persevered. “You learned your trade in Germany, did you not?”

“Oh, yes!” In his voice, there was an impulsive note which, combined with my sudden apprehension of a half-empty whiskey bottle on the shelf over the door, alarmed me, and I was afraid that he might begin to calendar, not the events of his past life, but its errors. For when he had been drinking, he became neither rebellious nor self-pitying as did my mother, but he brooded, morosely accusing himself of heartless infidelities to the traditions of the Catholic church, of his family, and of his country. My mother believed herself to be persecuted by everyone she had ever known—with the exception of Luibka, myself, and a few neighbor women—but he knew, and was powerless to rectify the fault, that all his torture came from his own flabby will which swung him like a pendulum between apathy and fretful indecision. I could see through the clouded windowpane that he was preoccupied with some tangential thought as he wrote down the specifications of Miss Pride’s feet in his notebook, and I was in mortal terror that he was going to tell her how long it had been since his last confession. When he did speak again, it was not in self-accusation, but it was from a point far removed from her question.

He said, “But even so, they don’t know good shoes from bad here.”

“If by ‘here’ you mean Chichester,” returned Miss Pride, “I’m certain you’re right. And while they might know skill when they saw it, these poor fishermen could not pay for it. But I beg to differ with you if by ‘here’ you mean something larger. Don’t you think, Mr. Marburg, that in Boston, we know the real thing?”

The light which flickered in my father’s face was quickly extinguished. “It’s too late for that,” he said.