He rose, and laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’m going now, Naomi. I’m not going to the restaurant. I’ll come back this afternoon. It’ll be all right. We’ll work it out somehow.”
She looked up at him. “You’ve changed your mind?”
“No, I don’t mean that. No, it’s better this way.”
“I’ll show you, Philip, what a good wife I can be.”
He picked up his hat, Jim Baxter’s hat, and suddenly he thought, “The old Philip is dead—as dead as Jim Baxter. I’ve dared to do it.”
Aloud he said, “Let’s not talk any more now. I’ll be back in an hour or two when you feel better.”
Then he went away, and outside the house, among the lilacs, he was suddenly sick.
7
He found a tiny flat of three rooms over a drugstore halfway up the hill from the railway station. It had been occupied by the family of a salesman who traveled for a house which manufactured false teeth. He had been promoted to a western territory where, with the great boom in the silver mines, the market for gold teeth had risen enormously.
He was a little fat man, with enormous black mustaches, all aglow with his promotion. “It’s the best gold tooth territory in America,” he told Philip.