‘Maybe that’s so,’ and Fred looked upon her with such lovelight in his eyes as not even eighteen holes in seventy-five could have set there. ‘I wouldn’t mind supporting Little Nero. I just hate to think about his being brought up to correct all my breaks.’

‘Well, if Little Nero is really OUR sort, he’d rather have a high-stepping, jolly, independent old grandfather than a reservoir!’

That night, remembering Howard’s old contention that he was fast in the handcuffs of routine, Fred so far flaunted the ritual of fetishism as to throw his shirt on the floor instead of, as was his compulsion, hanging it smoothly over his coat on the back of the one habitual chair.

Hazel picked it up. She supposed that it was a shirt that had been flung down, and not the strait-jacket of timidity.

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The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 30

All his life until now, night had been to Frederick William Cornplow only a blank of sleep. Even as a travelling salesman, thirty years ago, waiting at vile junction depots till after midnight or snoozing on bumpy branch trains, though he might have had but six hours’ sleep, it had been profound.

Now he took worries to bed with him; they cuddled up beside him when he retired, then laughed and bit him. As long as he tried to lie still, he went tediously over and over his frets:

Howard’s extravagance; the probability that he would not support Little Nero and the certainty that he would grieve young Annabel.

Sara’s new job, in which she would spare him and his pocketbook no more than she would spare herself.

Hazel’s alternation between miserly pride in adornment and a desire to see what the world was like.

Paul Popple’s reluctance to take authority at the agency. The wonder whether, if he left them to themselves, Paul and Howard would be forced to become dependable, or simply break.

Always, his own timidity and his meagre learning.

Worst of all, the neighbourhood opinion which kept him a steady and commonplace little citizen: the opinion of Dr. Kamerkink, Ed Appletree, the lawyer, even of Walter Lindbeck, that he would be a fool to do anything save settle inoffensively into old age. He saw that most of us do what most of the people about us mostly expect us to do, become brave or criminal or both, and he knew definite fear of the compulsion upon him to remain safe and dreary, a compulsion which could be escaped only by running away.

Running where? For what?

But when he sprang up from bed, scoffing at the need of sleep, then night became an adventure; sometimes wry, sometimes dismaying, always an excitement. He sat trying not to disturb Hazel, or he crept down to make coffee for himself and to sit brooding at the kitchen table.

He longed for Stonefield and the cottage William Tyler Longwhale. That elopement had proved that he could get along, be amused, without the crutch of daily industriousness which his friends so recommended.