The Truth Circulates — Alice Adams

Charley Lohr climbs down from Adams's room with news the family should already know: Walter is short in his accounts at Lamb and Company, and the item appeared in the evening paper. Alice finds her mother wailing over the runaway son while Adams paces, cursing the boy and shouting that he will repay every cent. Mrs. Adams blames her husband for refusing money Walter needed to flee; Adams insists the boy never meant restitution. Through the night the household fractures between lamentation and rage until Alice, practical even in grief, makes her father eat before he walks to the factory at dawn. He asks about Russell; Alice says the difference was made before Walter's scandal, that Russell already knows enough about her. At the glue works Adams discovers Lamb's enormous sign announcing a new liquid glue plant across the street, a message visible for blocks. Lamb arrives, cheerful and crushing, and Adams accuses him of trapping Walter and destroying the family's chance to raise restitution money. The confrontation leaves Adams shaking, shouting that Lamb has acted like a mean man, then collapsing as Lamb orders his car brought over. Truth has circulated in print and on the street; the social disaster Alice feared at dinner is now the least of their troubles.