And presently she began to suspect that Mary lay at the source of Philip’s behavior toward Naomi. A man didn’t give up living with his wife so easily unless there was another woman. A man didn’t do such things. Men were different from women. “Why,” she thought, “I’ve lived all these years without a man, and never once dreamed of re-marrying. I gave up my life to my son.”
It was Jason’s fault too (she thought). It was Jason’s bad blood in Philip. The boy wouldn’t have behaved like that if it hadn’t been for his father before him. That was where the weakness lay.
And now Mary probably came to see him at that room over the stables at night, and even in the daytime, because there was nothing to stop her coming and going. No one in the Flats would care, especially now, in the midst of the strike, and the Shanes wouldn’t even take notice of such a thing. Shane’s Castle had always been a sort of bawdy-house, and with the old woman dead the last trace of respectability had vanished....
She remembered, too, that Mary hadn’t been happy with her husband. Being married to a man like that who ran after women like Mamie Rhodes did something to a woman. Why, she herself could remember times when Jason’s behavior made her, out of revenge, want to be unfaithful to him; and if it could happen to her (Emma) why, what would be the effect on a godless woman like Mary Conyngham?
For a time she considered boldly the plan of going to Philip himself and forcing him to give up Mary Conyngham. Surely she could discuss a thing like that with her own son, to whom she had been both father and mother. There must be, no matter how deeply it lay buried, still a foundation of that sound and moral character which she had labored so long to create. “If only,” she thought, “I could make him feel again as he once felt. If only I could get through to the real Philip, my Philip, my little boy.” But he was hard, as hard as flint.
Twice she planned to go alone to the stable of Shane’s Castle, and once she got as far as the bridge before she lost courage and turned back. Always a shadow rose up between her and her resolution—the shadow of that day when, hidden by a screen in the corner of the restaurant, she had pled with him passionately, only to find herself beating her head against a wall of flint, to hear him saying, “You mustn’t talk like that. It’s not fair”; to see the thin jaw set in a hard line. No, she saw that it was impossible to talk to him. He was so strange and unruly that he might turn his back on her forever. The thought of it filled her with terror, and for two nights she lay awake, weeping in a debauch of self-pity.
But one thing was changed. In all the trouble with Philip, her doubts over marrying Moses Slade seemed to have faded away. At times when she felt tired and worn she knelt in her cold bedroom and thanked God for sending him to her. They could be married in two more months, and then ... then she would have some one to comfort her. She couldn’t go to him with her troubles now, lest the weight of them should frighten him. No, she saw that she must bear all her suffering alone until God saw fit to lift the cross from her shoulders.
One afternoon when Moses Slade had left, still breathing fire and thunder against Krylenko, she sat for a long time alone behind the screen, in the restaurant, looking out of the window. Her eyes saw nothing that passed, for she was seeing far beyond such things as shop-fronts and trolley-cars. She was thinking, “What has come over me lately? I haven’t any character any more. I’m not like Moses, who goes on fighting like an old war horse. I’ve let things slide. I haven’t faced things as I should. I’ve humored Philip, and see what’s come of it. When I kept hold on the reins everything went well, and now Philip’s ruining himself and going straight to the Devil. I should never have allowed Naomi to leave the house. She’s wax in his hands, with all her softness—she can never manage him and he needs to be managed just as his father did. If I’d treated his father the way Naomi treats Philip ... God knows what would have happened.”
She began automatically to stack the dishes on the table before her, as if she had gone back to the days when the restaurant had been only a lunch-room and she had herself waited on her customers.
“I must take hold,” she told herself. “There’s only one thing to do ... only one thing.... I must go and see Mary Conyngham. I must talk to her face to face and have it out. He’s my son. I bore him. I gave him life, and I have a right to save him.”