"Well, he didn't have a child by her because he preferred you."
Mrs. Farley's whole face trembled with her sense of outrage and impotence. Her eyes, squinting a little, were those of a creature who takes no pride in its rage. "Whatever you say, I can't forget my duty to your father. I wish you had never heard of this! You're a coarse, cold woman, Alice."
Alice smiled, glad her mother had hurt her. "Yes, you've told me that before."
They faced each other, Mrs. Farley trying to speak but unable. Alice saw how ugly her mother was and was ashamed of seeing it. Mrs. Farley turned her head a little and there were spiked wisps of iron-gray hair clinging on the nape of her scrawny, freckled neck.
"Let me go out!" Mrs. Farley said, stumbling suddenly toward the door in a blind gesture of protest and escape.
"I'm not keeping you," Alice said.
"Everything would be well enough if you weren't bent on persecuting me!" Mrs. Farley called back.
Alice was very calm. "I'm not persecuting you. If you really prefer to go on this way, tied like a millstone about Papa's neck, it is your own affair, I suppose; though I can't help protesting when I see it."
Mrs. Farley was gone. Alice felt a kind of hysterical relief in her mother's exit.