Tomorrow! Read Online Free PDF Page B

Frankly, I told the Bun not to take bets from you last week, till you paid. I was sore at the boys for doing it against orders. He is home sick now because I was so sore. I made him sick.”

    Jake hung up.

    So did Beau. He hung up fast and found, by listening to his wife’s tread, there was time to get back through the archway into the living room (sunken two steps since the remodeling) with the appearance of casualness. The wall then hid him long enough so that he was able to whip out his handkerchief and wipe his face. He contracted his abdomen in an effort to flush up a little blood, for he could see in the mirror wall around the fireplace that he was pale. He tipped the Scotch bottle over his highball glass, with his free hand—and when Netta came through the archway he was apparently imbibing the weak dregs of a drink, prior to pouring a fresh one.
    Even she did not realize he had just gulped four fingers of straight liquor.

    Netta was forty-eight and, though she had never had the coloring which made Lenore so peculiarly beautiful, she hall once possessed the same perfect features and the same unusual, slightly slanted shape of eye. Netta was a Hiver City girl, the daughter of a railroad brakeman who had seven other children. As a child, she had learned all I here is to know about the flea-bitten ways of life. Her world had been a mean street seen through second-hand lace curtains darned not to show. She had worked her way through normal school in near-by Lummus Center and taught second grade for two years. But she had never entertained an intention of making a career of teaching. Normal school had been her only feasible way of acquiring something resembling education. She had not even wanted real erudition—general or specific—merely its sufficient facsimile.

    Netta was pretty as a young woman; she was also durable and indomitable. Her personality was identical with her ambition which had been formed, delineated and defined to the utmost detail by American advertising. It is true, as advertising exponents hold, that advertising is educational and brings to millions a numberless bounty of cultivated benefits. It is also true, although the advertising exponents dislike to be reminded of the fact, that while their art creates a demand, often where demand did not thitherto exist, this same demand, in the case of multitudes, is greater than the fiscal capacity for its satisfaction or the cultural control for its employment. A struggle for additional revenue to satisfy cravings both synthetic and inordinate ensues everywhere in the land. Among persons whose morals are weak, the struggle becomes, ipso facto, unscrupulous.

    Had she been reared in a strict, Presbyterian family, Netta’s ethics would have been mighty indeed: she would have become a moral Midas. Unfortunately, her father, the brakeman, had been nominally a Methodist but actually merely an alcoholic. Her mother, though sporadically pious, by a kind of heritage from a backslid Baptist grandparent, was a woman of negligent libido with a chronic weakness for receiving and returning affection due, perhaps, to the small amount she ever received from or gave to her husband.

    The result was that Netta’s brothers and sisters, all younger, were in some hidden doubt concerning their true and probably several sires. Such circumstances obtain widely among the impoverished; they obtain at least quite often amongst the well-born and the well-heeled, too, though here they are differently regarded. In such latter circles, drunkenness may be known as
    “temperament” or “sensitivity” and loose sex manners in a mother may be designated as anything from “feminist pioneering” to what the country-club set does for fun. Poverty is deprived of such pretty tissues to put between human pretensions, and the almost universally rejected fact that people are, after all, animals.

    So Netta passed through childhood and into her early teens with one determination: to have