"I've done something for your children."
"I wish God had provided you with a family, Alice."
Tears rose to Alice's dull, ravaged eyes. She stared at him helplessly. "Good God!" she said at last. "And what are you?"
Laurence sat very still and unmoved, smiling, his pipe between his teeth, but his lip trembled in a sneer. "Heaven forbid that I should be expected to know!" he said.
Alice could not bear him near her. She went out, her heavy hips swinging with a kind of reluctant determination under her dingy rough cloth skirt, her broad, fleshy shoulders defiantly set.
Laurence noted, familiarly, wondering why it hurt him, how her wet, brown hair was half combed, tucked askew; and that her collar was off the band of her blouse at the nape of her neck, showing a patch of swarthy skin.
She rushed up the stairs and he could hear her slam the door of her room. He almost imagined he could hear her shriek as he had one time at night.
When Laurence talked to Alice about going away, she said, "Good God! Go anywhere! If you had had any guts you would have gone before this."
Mrs. Farley, hearing this, was afraid of Alice's violence, yet hoarded the consciousness of the weakness to which it confessed. Alice's face was already debauched with some secret passion. Mrs. Farley grew hard and strong against it.