"No," the Scholarly Attorney said, "the whole matter simply grew distasteful to him."

"Distasteful?" I said.

"Yes, distasteful. Matter came to such a pass that he could not perform happily in his chosen profession. He dreamed of falling every time he went to sleep. And he would wet his bed like a child."

"Falling, falling," George said through the bread, with a sound like _fawing, fawing__, but still smiled brightly in the midst of the chewing.

"One day when he got up on his platform with the loop around his neck, he could not jump. In fact, he could not move at all. He sank down on the platform and crouched there weeping. They had to remove him bodily, and bring him down," the Scholarly Attorney said. "Then for some time he was completely paralyzed."

"It sound," I said, "like that hanging act must have got pretty distasteful to him. As you so quaintly put it."

"He was completely paralyzed," he repeated, ignoring my wit. "Through no physical cause–if–" he pause–"anything ever comes to pass from a physical cause. For the physical world, though it exists and it existence cannot be denied without blasphemy, is never cause, it is only result, only symptom, it is the clay under the thumb of the potter and we–" He stopped, the gleam which has started up fitfully in the pale eyes flickered out, the hands which lifted to gesticulate sank. He leaned above the gas plate and stirred the soup. He resumed, "The trouble was here," and he laid a finger to his own forehead. "It was his spirit. Spirit is always cause–I tell you–" He stopped, shook his head, and peered at me before he said sadly, "But you do not understand."

"I reckon not," I agreed "He recovered from the paralysis," he said. "But George is not exactly a well man. He cannot bear high places. He will not look out the window. He covers his eyes with his hands when I lead him downstairs to go on the street to sell his artistic work. So I take him down only rarely now. He will not sit on a chair or sleep in a bed. He must always be on the floor. He does not like to stand. His legs simply collapse and he begins to cry. It is fortunate he has always had his artistic bent. It helps him to take his mind off thing. And he prays a good deal. I taught him to pray. That helps. I get up and pray and he says the prayers after me. When he wakes at night with the dreams and cannot sleep."

"Does he still wet the bed?" I asked.

"Sometimes," the Scholarly Attorney replied gravely.

I looked at George. He was weeping silently, the tears running down his smooth, flat cheeks, but his jawbone was not missing a beat on the bread. "Look at him," I said.

The Scholarly Attorney looked at him. "Stupid, stupid," he muttered fretfully, shaking his head, so that an additional flake or two of dandruff floated down to the black serge collar, "stupid of me to be talking that way with him listening. Stupid–I'm an old man and I forget–" and clucking and muttering and shaking his head in that same fretful fashion he poured some soup into a bowl, took a spoon, and went to George. "Look, look," he said, leaning, with a spoon of soup thrust toward George's face, "good, it's good soup–soup–take some soup."

But the tears continued to flow out of George's eyes, and he didn't open his mouth. But the jaws weren't working on the bread now. They were just shut tight.

The old man set the bowl on the floor, and with one hand still holding the spoon to George's mouth, with the other he patted George on the back soothingly, all the while clucking with that distraught, henlike, maternal little noise. All of a sudden he looked up at me, the spectacles hanging over, and said, peevishly like a mother, "I just don't know what to do–he just won't take soup–he won't eat much of anything but candy–chocolate candy–I just don't know–" His voice trailed off.

"Maybe you spoil him," I said.

He put the spoon back into the bowl, which was on the floor beside him, then began to fumble in his pockets. He fished out, finally, a bar of chocolate, somewhat wilted form the heat, and began to peel back the sticky tinfoil. The last tears were running down George's cheeks, while he watched the process, with his mouth open in damp and happy expectation. But he did not grab with his chubby little mitts.

Then the old man broke off a piece of chocolate and placed it between the expectant lips, and peered into George's face while taste buds, no doubt, glowed incandescent in the inner dark and gland with a tired, sweet, happy sigh released their juices, and George's face took on an expression of slow, deep, inward, germinal bliss, like that of a saint.

_Well__, I almost said to the old man, _you said the physical was never cause, but a chocolate bar is physical and look what it's causing, for to look at that face you might think it was a bite of Jesus and not a slug of Hershey's had done. And how you going to tell the difference, huh?__

But I didn't say it, for I was looking there at the old man, who was leaning over with his spectacles hanging and his coat hanging and his belly hanging from the leaning, and who was holding out another morsel of chocolate and who was clucking soft, and whose own face was happy, for that was the word for what his face was, and as I looked at him I suddenly saw the man in the long white room by the sea, the same man but a different man, and the rain of the squall driving in off the sea in the early dark lashed the windowpanes but it was a happy sound and safe because the fire danced on the hearth and on the windowpanes where the rain ran down to thread the night-black glass with silver, to mix the silver with the flames caught there, too, and the man leaned and held out something and said, "Here's what Daddy brought tonight, but just one bite now–" and the man broke off a piece and held it out–"just one bite, for your supper's near ready now–but after supper–"

I looked at the old man over there and my guts went warm and a big lump seemed to dissolve in my chest–as though I had carried a big lump around in there for so long I had got used to it and didn't realized it had been there until suddenly it was gone and the breath came easy. "Father," I said, "Father–"

The old man looked up at me and said querulously, "What–what did you say?"

_Oh, father, father!__ but he wasn't in the long white room by the sea any more and never would be, for he had walked out of it–why? why? because he wasn't enough of a man to run his own house, because he was a fool, because–and he had walked a long way and up the steps to this room where an old man leaned with the chocolate in his hand and happiness–if that was what it was–momentarily on his face. Only it wasn't on his face now. There was just the faint peevishness of an old person who hasn't quite understood the faint peevishness of an old person who hasn't quite understood something said.

But I had come a long way, too, from that long white room by the sea, I had got up off that hearthrug before the fire, where I had sat with my tin circus wagon and my colored crayons and paper, listening to the squall-driven rain on the glass, and where Daddy had leaned to say, "Here's what Daddy brought tonight," and I had come to this room where Jack Burden leaned against the wall with a cigarette in his mouth. Nobody was leaning over him to give him chocolate.

So, looking into the old man's face, answering his querulous question, I said, "Oh, nothing." For that was what it was. Whatever it had been was nothing now. For whatever was is not now, and whatever is will not be, and the foam that looks so sun-bright when the wind is kicking up the breakers lies streaked on the hard sand after the tide is out and looks like scum off the dishwater.

But there was something: scum left on the hard sand. So I said, "Yeah, there was something."

"What?"

"Tell me about Judge Irwin," I said.