Mabelle hurried off presently, and Mrs. Stimson came in duly to sit with the twins. She gave up the evening at her euchre club because the excitement of sitting up with the grandchildren of a man who had returned after being thought dead for twenty-six years was not to be overlooked. She would hear all the story at first hand when Philip and Naomi returned, before any one else in the Town had heard it. She could say, “I sat with the twins so that Philip and Naomi could go to supper with Mr. Downes himself. I heard the whole thing from them.”
As they went up the hill to the slate-colored house, Naomi said nothing, and so they walked in silence. She had begun to understand a little Philip’s queer moods, and she knew now that he was nervous and irritable. She had watched him so closely of late that she had become aware of a queer sense of strain which once she had passed over unnoticed. She had learned not to speak when Philip was like that. And as they climbed the hill, the silence, the strain, seemed to become unbearable. It was Philip who broke it by crying out suddenly, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I lied to you about Lily Shane. Well, I didn’t. Before God, I never spoke to her until to-day, and I wouldn’t have, even then, but she came to my room without my asking her.”
For a moment, she wanted to lie down in the snow and, burying her face in it, cry and cry. She managed to say, “I wasn’t even thinking of her. Honestly I wasn’t, Philip. And I believe you.”
“If that’s so, why do you sulk and not say anything?”
“I wasn’t sulking. I only thought you didn’t want to talk just now.”
“I hate it when you act like a martyr.” This time she was silent, and he added, “I suppose all women do it ... or most women ... it’s what Ma does when she wants to get her way. I hate it.”
She thought, “He said ‘most women’ because he meant all women but Lily Shane.” But she was silent. They did not speak again until they reached the slate-colored house.
It wasn’t really Naomi who lay at the bottom of his irritation, but the thought of his father. The return troubled him. Why should he have come now after twenty-six years? It was, he thought, almost indecent and unfair, in a way, to his mother. He tried, when he was not talking to Naomi, to imagine what he must be like—a man who Emma said had gone out to China to make money for his wife and child, a man who adored her and worshipped his son. He was troubled, because the moral image created by his mother seemed not to fit the enlarged, physical portrait in the parlor. In these last years he had come to learn a lot about the world and about people, and one of the things he had learned was that people are like their faces. His mother was like her large, rather coarse and energetic face; Naomi was like her pale, weak one; and Lily Shane and Mary and Uncle Elmer and even Krylenko and McTavish were like theirs. It was impossible to escape your own face. His father, he thought, couldn’t escape that face that hung in the parlor.
When the door opened and he stepped into the parlor, he saw that his father hadn’t escaped his face. He felt, with a sudden sensation of sickness, that his father was even worse than his face. It was the same, only a little older, and the outlines had grown somehow dim and vague from weakness and self-indulgence. Why, he thought again, did he ever come back?
But his mother was happy again. Any one could see that.