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and obliged to make his way in a sleepy stupor up lurching ladders to the deck of the ship (or like the ship itself, pursuing blindly its charted course) Spud passed from room to room of the apartment until he found himself in the bathroom in front of the washstand. He splashed cold water on his face and reached out with his eyes shut until his hand came in contact with a towel. It was hanging on the rack marked S ISTER but before he discovered that fact the damage had been done. He folded the towel, now damp and streaked with dirt, and put it back in what he imagined was the same way it had been before. Then he combed his hair earnestly, made a wild tormented face at himself in the bathroom mirror, and said, “Oh fuss!” so loudly that his mother and Helen heard him in the kitchen and stopped talking.
    Their astonishment did not last. When he appeared in the doorway they hardly noticed him. He drew the kitchen stool out from under the enamel table and sat down and began to tie his shoes. When he finished, he straightened up suddenly. There was something that bothered him—something that he had done, or not done. Before he could remember what it was, Helen made him move so that she could get the bread knife out of the table drawer, and the whole thing passed out of his mind.
    The kitchen smells, the way his mother took a long fork and tested the green beans that were cooking in a kettle on the top of the stove, the happy familiarity of all her movements, reassured him. It seemed almost like the kitchen of the house in Wisconsin. But then there was the rattle of a key in the front door, and Mr. Latham came in, looking tired and discouraged. Before Mr. Latham had even hung up his coat in the hall closet, the atmosphere of security and habit had vanished. Nothing was left but a bare uncomfortable apartment that would never be like the house they were used to. And when they sat down, the food seemed hardly worth coming to the table for.

7
    E vans Latham was an honest and capable man. He had worked hard all his life, and with no other thought than to provide for his family, but somehow things never turned out for him the way they should have. There was always some accident, some freak of circumstance that couldn’t possibly have been anticipated or avoided. Bad luck dogged his heels wherever he went. It was not the work of his enemies (he had none) and must therefore have been caused by a disembodied malignancy.
    If bright and early some morning the Lathams had left their apartment, which was not what Mrs. Latham would have chosen anyway, and had set up some kind of temporary quarters in the park across the street, among the nursemaids and the babies in their carriages; if Mr. Latham, with advice and assistancefrom the old men and the boys who gathered in the late afternoon to play touchball, had offered sacrifices—the phonograph, perhaps, or the garish ashtray; if he had then called upon all their friends, or since they had no friends, their neighbors, to join them by moonlight with faces blackened or with masks, and wearing swords or armed with shotguns and revolvers or shinny sticks or golf clubs or canes; and if, at a signal from Reverend Henry Roth of St. Mary’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, they had rushed into the deserted apartment firing guns, overturning everything under which a malignant spirit might lurk, tossing the furniture out of doors, beating against walls and windows; and if the old men and the young boys had marched nine times around the outside of the apartment building throwing torches about, shouting, screaming, beating sticks together, rattling old pans, while the nursemaids ran up and down, up and down the cellar stairs; if all this had been done properly, by people with believing hearts, it is possible that the spirit would have been driven off and that, for a time anyway, prosperity would have attended the efforts of Mr. Latham. Unfortunately this remedy, tried for centuries on one continent or