THE CHILD IS THE MEANING
357
he had ever been before and full of loud praise of the army and of
military training for boys between eighteen and twenty-one. This
praise of discipline was a new version of his affirmation of conven–
tional morality. Yet it was also a sign of his enjoyment of good health.
"My whole life would have been different," he said, "if I ha
only been drafted in the last war! I would have learned to take care
of myself!"
Yet his return was marked by a complete surrender to his old
way of life, his late mornings, long breakfasts, and the attention of
his mother.
"Mamma, let the water in the tub," he said again as soon as he
returned and again she waited on him hand and foot. The one habit
he retained from the army was that of sitting on his bed and putting
on his socks by throwing his legs up. His mother did not like this
method and his resistance to her criticism of it was perhaps the only
proof that his mother's attention, though initiated by her, required
his acceptance.
Seymour returned to being a bookmaker and he prospered with
the wartime prosperity. His mother was satisfied . She felt that at
last he had become a real man, equal to a man's responsibilities. His
shortcomings now were part of a system which provided him and
her with a decent living. She had hated gambling until Seymour
became a bookmaker, but now she was distressed by the effort made
by the city officials to stop gambling, an effort which Seymour evaded
by going to one of the suburbs and receiving the calls of the bettors
in the house of a friend, who was paid for this privilege and who
took Seymour home in the evening in his car. Ruth Hart felt now
that the city administration was wrong to try to stop gambling because
it was a part of human nature to gamble and when a human being
had extra money, he had the right to risk it and enjoy the heady
excitement of a bet. There had always been gambling and there would
always be gambling, so that it was foolish and irritating that the
police made Seymour go out of town.
As
he prospered, Seymour's spendthrift habits increased. He
liked to eat expensive meals in restaurants and he was not at home
for dinner very often. He let his mother give him breakfast, but he
preferred to have lunch elsewhere, and when Jasper visited his grand–
mother one afternoon, his grandmother remarked to him with both
pride and irony :
"You see: he is doing me a favor, he is eating the lunch I made
for him."
