It was Sunday. Winnie had fallen sick, and, to escape the feeling of tension that prevailed at home, Laurence went into the country for a long walk.
Winnie might die. Then what? In the sense of oppression he experienced, the thought of Winnie's danger awoke something in him which he refused to recognize, which was like a stealthy and terrible hope of relief.
He walked on, immersed in himself, scarcely realizing that he moved. Then the ardor of his imaginings subsided in the familiar contours of being and he saw the road again, stretching before him like a shadowed light and the pale trees standing away on either side against the dim enormous sky.
Laurence wondered if he had grown suddenly old. Formerly, without articulating it, he had experienced a sense of immanence on every hand. Now he felt dry and exhausted in his nameless understanding. Everything remained outside him. He had lost the power of enlarging his being. From his numbness he regarded enviously what he considered the illusions of others, and yet his exhaustion seemed to him the sum of life and he could not but consider with contempt all those who imagined that there was anything further.
Only the horror that was between Winnie and himself gave him a little life. The hideousness of his fatherhood made his apathy glow a little like an illumined grimace. Through sheer irrelevance it seemed to have some meaning. He began to depend on this ugly fact of the child he did not want.
Yet he could not bear to be in the sickroom where Winnie was. Her sweetly pathetic commonplace was so grotesquely familiar that he could scarcely endure to be aware of it close to the sense of what she held.
In these days she was keenly dramatizing herself. She glanced stealthily sidewise at the mirror and the Madonna look came into her face. When Bobby and May were beside her, she drew them within her thin little arms and pressed them to her breast with an air of ecstasy and reverence.
But she did not care to have them close to her for long, and if they fell into some childish dispute she called, in a peevish complaining voice, for Mamma Farley, and said that no one considered her or remembered that she was sick.
When Laurence reached home after his walk it was eleven o'clock. He passed through the still house and up the stairs to the bedroom, wondering if Winnie were asleep. When he opened the door he saw the light shining on her where she lay on the lounge with her eyes shut.