When Laurence looked at his mother's stooped back in its dowdy cotton dress and the wispy hair clinging to the sweated nape of her yellow wrinkled neck, her verbal acceptance of his resolution to go abroad maddened him. He was not certain that he wanted to go and he required her articulate resistance to force him to it.
Instead, she persisted in speaking to others of "Laurence's departure," as though it were already a settled thing.
Mr. Farley said, "I don't know! I don't know! You know what you want, Laurence." He felt that no one but himself understood growing old. What his wife knew of old age he did not regard as knowledge. She was old without understanding it. He had stopped writing to Helen without ever having made any definite proposal to her. He felt obliged to send her checks for their boy, but if she did not acknowledge them, though it hurt him, he was glad. He tried not to think of her. His conviction of age was born of knowledge that was deep in his flesh, and so it was good. It was beyond doubt. It was his. He felt, without being able to express it, that truth was at the end of things. And that what he had come to now was truth because there was nothing more. It was the end of life. He felt that some day it would matter very little whether Laurence went abroad or not. Alice's restless eccentricity troubled Mr. Farley like a dream, but he knew that her unrest would grow weak like his own. She would know truth as he knew it.
When he left the living-room where he had been with Laurence and Alice, Alice said, "Papa Farley walks as though he were a hundred."
"Maybe he is."
"You're very cryptic, Laurence."
"I'm tired, Alice."
"Well, you haven't grown tired through exerting yourself on behalf of any one else," Alice said sharply.
"Nor have you, I think."