Emma interrupted. “I took care of my child and did all the work as well. I never complained or made excuses.”
“You didn’t have twins.... Sometimes my back fairly breaks. Oh, if I had the right kind of husband, I wouldn’t be in your dreary old house!”
Emma turned again, “Philip ... Philip....”
But Philip was gone. She saw him, hatless and without an overcoat, running through the snow that had begun to come down slowly and softly as a white eiderdown.
3
He only stopped running when he grew so weak that he could no longer make an effort. He had gone, without knowing why, in the direction of the Mills, and presently he found himself, with a savage pain just beneath his heart, sitting on the steps of McTavish’s undertaking parlors. It was almost dark, and the air was cold and still; he felt it creeping about him as the heat went out of his body. He knew that if he caught cold he would die and suddenly he wanted to live, horribly. It was as if that sickening scene had in some way released him from the bondage of the two women. They seemed all at once to belong to another world in which he played no rôle, a world strange and horrible and fantastic. Even the twins did not seem to be his children, but creatures born somehow of the two women and all they stood for in his tired mind. They were two squalling tomato-colored infants in whom he could take no interest—a judgment sent by fate as a punishment for his own weakness and indecision. He grew bitter for the first time and out of the bitterness there was born a new strength.
Sitting there in the softly falling snow, he resolved to go his own way. He couldn’t desert Naomi and his children, but he could tell her that he was through with her once and for all. And he saw suddenly the whole sickening depth of the tangle—that it was her fault no more than his, that she had suffered as much as himself, that perhaps in the end she would suffer more, because (he knew it with a kind of disgust) she loved him with all her soul and body.
Beating his arms against his body, he rose and turned the handle of the door. McTavish was inside, alone, sitting by the stove. At the sound of the handle turning, he looked up and grinned.
“Hello, Philip,” he said, and then quickly, “What the hell are you doing out without a coat or hat?”
Philip grinned, and the very grin hurt his face, as if it had been frozen by the cold. “I came out in a hurry ... I wanted to borrow a coat and hat off you.”