Her eyes lost their pleasure in seeing him, her face flooded with scarlet shame; she spread her hands over her ballooning apron as if they could hide what her clothes could not.

Frank was shaking. "The dirty old goat!"

"Frank, I can't let you say things like that. You're a man now, you ought to understand. This is no different from the way you came into the world yourself, and it deserves the same respect. It isn't dirty. When you insult Daddy, you insult me."

"He had no right! He should have left you alone!" Frank hissed, wiping a fleck of foam from the corner of his trembling mouth. "It isn't dirty," she repeated wearily, and looked at him from her clear tired eyes as if she had suddenly decided to put shame behind her forever. "It's not dirty, Frank, and nor is the act which created it."

This time his face reddened. He could not continue to meet her gaze, so he turned and went through into the room he shared with Bob, Jack and Hughie. Its bare walls and little single beds mocked him, mocked him, the sterile and featureless look to it, the lack of a presence to warm it, a purpose to hallow it. And her face, her beautiful tired face with its prim halo of golden hair, all alight because of what she and that hairy old goat had done in the terrible heat of summer.

He could not get away from it, he could not get away from her, from the thoughts at the back of his mind, from the hungers natural to his age and manhood. Mostly he managed to push it all below consciousness, but when she flaunted tangible evidence of her lust before his eyes, threw her mysterious activity with that lecherous old beast in his very teeth .... How could he think of it, how could he consent to it, how could he bear it? He wanted to be able to think of her as totally holy, pure and untainted as the Blessed Mother, a being who was above such things though all her sisters throughout the world be guilty of it. To see her proving his concept of her wrong was the road to madness. It had become necessary to his sanity to imagine that she lay with that ugly old man in perfect cha/y, to have a place to sleep, but that in the night they never turned toward each other, or touched. Oh, God!

A scraping clang made him look down, to find he had twisted the brass rail of the bed's foot into an S.

"Why aren't you Daddy?" he asked it.

"Frank," said his mother from the doorway.