Alice Adams

“You’re off,” Walter said, in the same quiet way. “He knows I’m there. He spoke to me yesterday: he asked me how I was getting along with my work.”

“He did?” Adams said, seeming not to believe him.

“Yes. He did.”

“What else did he say, Walter?” Mrs. Adams asked quickly.

“Nothin’. Just walked on.”

“I don’t believe he knew who you were,” Adams declared.

“Think not? He called me ‘Walter Adams.’”

At this Adams was silent; and Walter, after waiting a moment, said:

“Well, are you going to do anything about me? About what I told you I got to have?”

“What is it, Walter?” his mother asked, since Adams did not speak.

Walter cleared his throat, and replied in a tone as quiet as that he had used before, though with a slight huskiness, “I got to have three hundred and fifty dollars. You better get him to give it to me if you can.”

Adams found his voice. “Yes,” he said, bitterly. “That’s all he asks! He won’t do anything I ask HIM to, and in return he asks me for three hundred and fifty dollars! That’s all!”

“What in the world!” Mrs. Adams exclaimed. “What FOR, Walter?”

“I got to have it,” Walter said.

“But what FOR?”

His quiet huskiness did not alter. “I got to have it.”

“But can’t you tell us–-“

“I got to have it.”

“That’s all you can get out of him,” Adams said. “He seems to think it’ll bring him in three hundred and fifty dollars!”

A faint tremulousness became evident in the husky voice. “Haven’t you got it?”

“NO, I haven’t got it!” his father answered. “And I’ve got to go to a bank for more than my payroll next week. Do you think I’m a mint?”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Walter,” Mrs. Adams interposed, perplexed and distressed. “If your father had the money, of course he’d need every cent of it, especially just now, and, anyhow, you could scarcely expect him to give it to you, unless you told us what you want with it. But he hasn’t got it.”

“All right,” Walter said; and after standing a moment more, in silence, he added, impersonally, “I don’t see as you ever did anything much for me, anyhow either of you.”

Then, as if this were his valedictory, he turned his back upon them, walked away quickly, and was at once lost to their sight in the darkness.

“There’s a fine boy to’ve had the trouble of raising!” Adams grumbled. “Just crazy, that’s all.”

“What in the world do you suppose he wants all that money for?” his wife said, wonderingly. “I can’t imagine what he could DO with it. I wonder –-” She paused. “I wonder if he–-“

“If he what?” Adams prompted her irritably.

“If he COULD have bad—associates.”

“God knows!” said Adams. ”I don’t! It just looks to me like he had something in him I don’t understand. You can’t keep your eye on a boy all the time in a city this size, not a boy Walter’s age. You got a girl pretty much in the house, but a boy’ll follow his nature. I don’t know what to do with him!”

Mrs. Adams brightened a little. “He’ll come out all right,” she said. “I’m sure he will. I’m sure he’d never be anything really bad: and he’ll come around all right about the glue-works, too; you’ll see. Of course every young man wants money—it doesn’t prove he’s doing anything wrong just because he asks you for it.”

“No. All it proves to me is that he hasn’t got good sense asking me for three hundred and fifty dollars, when he knows as well as you do the position I’m in! If I wanted to, I couldn’t hardly let him have three hundred and fifty cents, let alone dollars!”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to let ME have that much— and maybe a little more,” she ventured, timidly; and she told him of her plans for the morrow. He objected vehemently.

“Oh, but Alice has probably asked him by this time,” Mrs. Adams said. “It really must be done, Virgil: you don’t want him to think she’s ashamed of us, do you?”

“Well, go ahead, but just let me stay away,” he begged. “Of course I expect to undergo a kind of talk with him, when he gets ready to say something to us about Alice, but I do hate to have to sit through a fashionable dinner.”

“Why, it isn’t going to bother you,” she said; “just one young man as a guest.”

“Yes, I know; but you want to have all this fancy cookin’; and I see well enough you’re going to get that old dress suit out of the cedar chest in the attic, and try to make me put it on me.”

“I do think you better, Virgil.”

“I hope the moths have got in it,” he said. “Last time I wore it was to the banquet, and it was pretty old then. Of course I didn’t mind wearing it to the banquet so much, because that was what you might call quite an