By Arthur Hailey

The weekend had been lonely. His daughter, Bar­bara, was away somewhere and Matt Zaleski had had to fend for himself. In the old days, when his wife was alive, she had always helped him over humps like model changeover with understanding, extra affection, and meals which—no matter how long she waited for him to come home—she prepared with special care. But it seemed so long since he had known any of those things that it was hard to remember Freda had been dead less than two years. Matt realized, sadly, that when she was alive he had not appreciated her half as much as he did now.

He found himself, too, resenting Barbara's preoc­cupation with her own life and work. Matt would have liked nothing more than to have Barbara remain at home, available whenever he came there, and thus fill­ing—at least in part—her mother's role. For a while after Freda's death Barbara had seemed to do that.

She prepared their meals each evening, which she and Matt ate together, but gradually Barbara's outside interests revived, her work at the advertising agency increased, and nowadays they were rarely in the house together except to sleep, and occasionally for a hurried week­day breakfast. Months ago Barbara had urged that they seek a housekeeper, which they could well afford, but Matt resisted the idea. Now, with so much to do for himself, on top of pressures at the plant, he wished he had agreed.

He had already told Barbara, early in August that he had changed his mind and she could go ahead and hire a housekeeper after all, to which Barbara replied that she would do so when she could, but at the moment was too busy at the agency to take time out to adver­tise, interview, and get a housekeeper installed.

Matt had bristled at that, believing it to be a woman's busi­ness—even a daughter's—to run a home, and that a man should not have to become involved, particularly when he was under stress, as Matt was now. Barbara made it clear, however, that she regarded her own work as equally important with her father's, an attitude he could neither accept nor understand.

There was a great deal else, nowadays, that Matt Zaleski failed to understand. He had only to open a newspaper to become alternately angry and bewil­dered at news of traditional standards set aside, old moralities discarded, established orders undermined. No one, it seemed, respected anything any more—in­cluding constituted authority, the courts, law, parents, college presidents, the military, the free enterprise sys­tem, or the American flag, under which Matt and oth­ers of his generation fought and died in World War II.

As Matt Zaleski saw it, it was the young who caused the trouble, and increasingly he hated most of them: those with long hair you couldn't tell from girls; stu­dents know-it-alls, choked up with book learning, mili­tant blacks, demanding the millennium on the spot and not content to progress slowly; and all other protesters, rioters, contemptuous of everything in sight and beat­ing up those who dared to disagree.

The whole bunch of them, in Matt's view, were callow, immature, know­ing nothing of real life, contributing nothing .... When he thought of the young his bile and blood pressure rose together.

And Barbara, while certainly no rebellious student or protester, sympathized openly with most of what went on, which was almost as bad. For this, Matt blamed the people his daughter associated with, including Brett DeLosanto whom he continued to dislike.

In reality, Matt Zaleski—like many of his age group— was the prisoner of his long-held views. In conversa­tion which sometimes became heated arguments. Bar­bara had tried to persuade him to her own conviction: that a new breadth of outlook had developed, that be­liefs and ideas once held immutable had been exam­ined and found false; that what younger people de­spised was not the morality of their parents' generation but a facade of morality with duplicity behind; not old standards in themselves, but hypocrisy and self-decep­tion which, all too often, the so-called standards shiel­ded. In fact, it was a time of question, of exciting intel­lectual experiment from which mankind could only gain.

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