One good thing was that Vance did not look like his sister Idah. That was something. He was long and lean, with a way of leaping around as if he was made of rubber. He had a hook nose and fishy gray eyes set astonishingly close together for the simple reason that his narrow face left no room for them to spread out. His long head, in fact, seemed to have a dimension missing, being all profile, rising from lively Adam’s apple over the nasal hump and up to the peak of his scalp, from which a fountain of greasy yellow hair sprawled in all directions. It was a pity he did not have his sister’s cosmetic privileges, for his skin was decorated with a pink rash which, She explained to Papa, had been faithfully his since infancy.

“His blood is too rich,” She explained proudly. “All the Hawkins have rich blood.”

As if these charms were not enough, he had a habit of holding his mouth agape in a half smile, revealing an extraordinary set of pale salmon gums studded with cigarette-stained stumps of teeth. The reason for keeping his mouth open appeared to be no vanity over his remarkable expanse of gums, but a convenience for jumping into the conversation with no loss of time. It was plain that listening to anybody was a hardship; he could scarcely wait for his chance to hop in, usually with an anecdote prefaced by the phrase, “like the fellow in the show.” His words were lost in uncontrollable chortles in which Papa, coming home early to welcome his in-law, only feebly joined. Vance had a baffling way of darting his eyes around and behind you, so that you found yourself following his gaze uneasily, half expecting some strange tropical bird to be wafting about your head, or possibly some psychic phenomena to be manifesting itself. His sister could not restrain her pride in him, and nodded triumphantly around the room at every remark he made. There, that’s the way to talk, she seemed to say; here’s a party that knows what it’s all about.

Papa made a polite effort to be amused by the newcomer, but it had never been his nature to be impressed by anybody but himself, so in due course his basic irritation betrayed itself.

“I guess there’s not many towns of any size in this country that Vance hasn’t seen,” his sister declared. “It’s an education just listening to him tell it.”

“I covered a good deal of territory myself,” Papa reminded her. “I guess I’ve been around as much as Vance here.”

Vance said, all joking aside, his mind was pretty set on making California his permanent home. With his damages he could live pretty well, working when he felt like it, laying off when he pleased. There was a chance of getting more damages too, he said, if anything should complicate the condition of his foot. He’d seen to that, all right, and didn’t need a lawyer to tell him. Papa said personally he didn’t give a snap of his little finger about California, or Dayton, or Detroit either for that matter. Give him a real town like Cleveland or, say, Atlantic City, or Buffalo. Or if you wanted good climate and plenty of sun take a little place like Elmville, where the sun shone all the time and a man could raise a family on the fat of the land for fifteen dollars a week, eggs twelve cents a dozen, all the berries you could put up free.