her shapeless figure and unbounded and unexpressed (verbally, that
is) love for her children. Pa Werner--sullen, lazy, brooding,
tyrannical--she soothed and mollified for the children's sake, or
shouted down with a shrewish outburst, as the occasion required. An
expert stone-mason by trade, Pa Werner could be depended on only when he
was not drinking, or when he was not on strike, or when he had not
quarrelled with the foreman. An anarchist, Pa--dissatisfied with things
as they were, but with no plan for improving them. His evil-smelling
pipe between his lips, he would sit, stocking-footed, in silence,
smoking and thinking vague, formless, surly thoughts. This sullen unrest
and rebellion it was that, transmitted to his son, had made Buzz the
unruly braggart that he was, and which, twenty or thirty years hence,
would find him just such a one as his father--useless, evil-tempered,
half brutal, defiant of order.

It was in May, a fine warm sunny day, that Ma Werner, looking up from
the garden patch where she was spading, a man's old battered felt hat
perched grotesquely atop her white head, saw Buzz lounging homeward,
cutting across lots from Bates Street, his dinner pail glinting in the
sun. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Ma Werner straightened
painfully and her over-flushed face took on a purplish tinge. She wiped
her moist chin with an apron-corner.

As Buzz espied her his gait became a swagger. At sight of that swagger
Ma knew. She dropped her spade and plodded heavily through the freshly
turned earth to the back porch as Buzz turned in at the walk. She
shifted her weight ponderously as she wiped first one earth-crusted shoe
and then the other.

"What's the matter, Ernie? You ain't sick, are you?"