...of finality

There was a horrible silence while they stared at the wad of paper on the table. Then his father slipped the bandaged hand free from the sling and began slowly stretching it back and forth to flex the cramped and clicking elbow. His face wore an expression of grim aloofness as though it were not his own hand he was experimenting with but someone else's. On his mother's features horror and pity were written. David gazed from one to the other and finally like theirs his eyes came to rest on the other hand that had just settled softly on the table, glimmering and peninsular on the green oilcloth. Minutes seemed to pass in a dull dragging vacancy in which no word was spoken. David looked up. His mother's face was unchanged as though that anguished look were caught in stone. But his father's face had become flushed, relaxed; the deep breath hissed softly at his nostrils. His eyelids had begun to linger at their shutting, opening not in one but in two stages. He spoke. Faint ratchets of effort against drowsiness and fatigue ticked and caught in his voice, thickening it. And as though to himself -

'I'll never go back to work there again. I'll never go back to printing at all. I'm through. Whatever work I do hereafter, it's going to be out doors - alone if I can. But out doors always... I'll not let myself be hemmed in by ink and iron any more. I don't want any foremen for my friends. I don't want anybody. I - I have no fortune with men.'

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]