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with sparkling new linoleum, with separate beds for the children, and maybe a few additions to the furniture. She could hardly bear to see Morris struggling with the small household tasks he had to perform while she was in bed; awkwardly trying to draw stockings on the children's restless legs. And when she ventured to make a suggestion he would become angry, muttering words like sparks from a seething volcano.

Gertrude herself came from poor parents. Her father, a baker, had died young. While still a child she had known what it was to stand in the glare of flaming ovens and to experience long nights without sleep. While the girls of other families went through school and read books, she barely managed to get through three grades-and then her schooling was over. Fixed in her mind was the obsession that there were higher and lower classes of humanity. When the girls of the well-to-do families refused to associate with her, she was not able to feel any resentment towards them. That was the way the world had been created, and that was the way things had to be. A mysterious Fate awarded For- tune to some and failure to others, happiness to the rich and misery to the poor. Her husband Morris was too contemptuous of her ideas to refute them; he would merely smile when she expressed her philosophy, enjoying the calm that enveloped him as she spoke.

True, since she had come to Paris, some of her ideas had changed, but she still retained her earlier feeling of awe towards the wealthier classes, the "better" people. Nor had she lost the notion that she was somehow beneath her husband, with his distinguished lineage and cultural background. She even considered herself responsible for his personal failure in life.

Morris came from a rich home. He should have been a