THE CHILD IS THE MEANING
275
and much of what Rebecca had given him as dowry wa11 thrown
away in an effort to cover the stocks he had bought on margin.
Rebecca decided immediately to start a small dress store so that James
would not feel that he was supporting her mother and her brother.
For the first time Seymour had a job at which he could work at his
own hours; he helped Rebecca $ell dresses in the store and he worked
in the late afternoons and evenings. Rebecca was pregnant and yet
st\}rdy enough to give herself to her new business.
"I always wanted to be in business for myself," she said.
Seymour showed his powers of persuasion as his sister's sales
clerk. He was able to kid the customer in the right way by flattering
her and telling that she looked like a high school girl. Seymour had
always been persuasive but too often he had used this power merely
to borrow money for the sake of betting.
Yet the business was not a success because of the depression. And
just before Rebecca gave birth to a boy, the whole store front burned
down and it was decided to give up the business because now Rebecca
had to take care of her child. James had for some time been dissatis–
fied because Ruth Hart no longer cooked for him the kind of dinners
he had been given as a suitor, and he tried again to persuade Rebecca
to set up a separate household where they would live alone. Rebecca
was clever at putting him off, but his resentment of his mother-in-law
became more and more of a compulsion until he said one day that it
was his theory that after a certain age, when they were no longer
useful, human beings ought to be painlessly executed, as among the
Eskimos. James was a man of many theories, but this was unlike most
of them. Seymour, hearing this, decided that his mother had been
insulted and became furious.
"They ought to put you to death," said Seymour, "you're only
ten years younger than Mamma! That's the most awful thing I ever
heard anyone say and I've heard a lot in my time."
The quarrel blew over, but the conflict renewed itself, and its
true cause was James's disappointment in his marriage which he
had expected to be just like his courtship. And now he barely made
a living as a dentist, for he had never been a very good dentist and he
talked too much to his patients. Rebecca decided to go back to work
and she went back, but she had lost her touch, her sense of fashion
and vogue which had made her a good imitator. Hence, she had
to go back to the work-table of the shop, the job she had started with
as a young girl many years before. Yet this helped to support the
family and to quiet James, for Ruth Hart was useful in taking care
