She looked at him suddenly. “You’re not planning to take her back if she comes running home with her tail between her legs?”
“I don’t know ... I have a feeling that she’ll never come back.”
“Leaving her children without a thought!”
“I don’t suppose she left them without a thought ... but sometimes a person can be so unhappy that he only wants to die. I know ... I’ve been like that. Besides, she never wanted the children any more than I wanted them.”
“How can you say such a wicked thing!”
His face looked thin and pinched and white. The water, all unnoticed, had formed a pool about his feet on the immaculate carpet of Emma’s hall. He was shaking with chill. He was like a dead man come up out of the sea. And deep inside him a small voice was born, which kept saying to him, “It’s that ridiculous woman in a flowered wrapper and pink cap who lies at the bottom of all this misery.” It was a tiny voice, but, like the voice that the Reverend Castor had tried to still by repeating Psalms, it would not die. It kept returning.
“It’s not wicked. It’s only the truth ... and it’s only the truth I care about to-night. I don’t give a damn for anything else in the world ... not for what people think, or about what they say. They can all go to hell for all I care.” His face was white and expressionless, like the face of a man already dead. It was the voice that was terrible.
“You needn’t swear, Philip.” She showed signs of weeping. “And I never thought my boy would turn against his own mother—not for any woman in the world.”
“Now don’t begin that. I’m not your boy any longer. I’ve got to grow up sometime. I’m not turning against you. I’m just sick to death of the whole mess. I’m through with the whole thing.”
She wiped her eyes with a corner of the ridiculous flowered wrapper, and the sight made him want to laugh. The tiny voice grew more clamorous.