Winnie lay face downward and sobbed. There was no triumph in her now. She felt herself as if already large with child, heavy and helpless. Through the darkness of her closed lids she could see, as if before her, Laurence's coarse and handsome head, his eyes turned toward her with their strained gaze, and the odd set of his neck that kept his face always a little to one side. She knew now how much she hated him.
Laurence, walking along the deserted streets, was relieved to find the long vistas ending in darkness. The night rose high and expressionless before him. Beyond the dim lights, the violet-blue horizon was a clear quiet stretch like a lake of glass covered with flowering stars.
His pain was choked in him, suffocated by the quiet.
His mind was sick yet with Winnie's sickness, but the pain of her no longer belonged to him. He wondered if she would have a child, if he had killed her. But the agony of his conjecture related to something already finished. She had made him love her against them both. He did not want love like that. It could never be otherwise. They were separated from each other by their own bodies.
PART II
As Mr. Farley walked home from business he had a troubled look. When he came into his own street he scarcely seemed aware of his whereabouts. For several days he had been restless and ill at ease with himself. His resentment toward Alice was blunted and dispersed by his determination to think well of the world. He needed this charity to think well of himself. What disturbed and depressed him most was her forcible suggestion of incompleteness in things which he had looked upon as finished.
He went up the steps. There was a Kansas City newspaper in the box. It hurt him to take it out and put it in his pocket.
When he opened the front door and stepped into the empty hall, the first look of the place pained him with its harsh familiarity; but, when he had laid his hat down, he passed on into the living-room and seated himself in one of the old tapestry-covered chairs, and his antagonism and desire to exist in separateness melted in the faintly bitter sense of inevitability which he experienced. The old house with the low ceilings and broad stone mantelpieces and the walls hung in stained, dark figured papers (just as he had bought it with the first savings of his married life) represented the known, asserting him through his identity with it.
He leaned forward, closing his eyes and pinching his lids together between his thumbs and forefingers.