“We strolled down Main street,” Vance confided later to the doctor . . . “Sid tightened up the minute we began passing the shopwindows and he saw his reflection in the glass  . . . I realized after a bit he didn’t at first recognize the reflection the windows was his own, he had changed so in every which way while he was in jail that he thought at first he was looking at the face of a stranger. He kept staring at himself in the glass. . . . We walked on then and pretty soon passed the Royal movie house which he had attended as a boy. Then we began to meet people we both half-­knew or knew casually, and they nodded and sort of grinned, sickly-­like, and that made things worse. . . . He walked like a man does through a gauntlet, with his mouth set and his jaw tight, and dim eyes. . . . Then we went into the Sweet Shop and seated ourselves clear in the back out of notice. . . . Oh, why did we do it after all? . . . We ordered sodas . . . well, he couldn’t drink his, and I wasn’t able to finish mine. . . . But anyhow he did it! He appeared! But on the way back he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me to go to town again, hear?’ And then in rapid fire he says, ‘Did you see who was sittin’ in the seat directly facing ours? . . . No? Well, it was him . . .’ ”

“Him?” Vance had replied totally in the dark.

“Yes, him, the one who has always been doggin’ me ever since I can remember, Vance! You know very well who . . . The renderer!”

“Oh Roy Sturtevant again! Yes, I guess I saw him. But he ain’t in that occupation, Sid.” Vance heard himself slipping into the bad grammar his brother used and which Vance blamed on jail, forgetting Sid had always used such grammar, had always been a poor “scholar,” and that only his glory, short-­lived as it had been, as a halfback on the high school football team and a champion swimmer and diver disguised the fact that in all other ways he had never, in the opinion and phraseology of Dr. Ulric’s village, “amounted to a hill of beans.”

“His Grandfather was the renderer, Sid, a long, long time ago,” Vance heard himself repeating this worn bit of information to his brother’s deaf ears.

“I never want to set eyes on him again as long as I live . . . I feel he brought me all my bad luck. He was somehow behind my fall!”

Sidney gave his brother a look such as he had never given him before.