Then, for no reason at all, unless it happened through that train of memories fired by the behavior of Moses Slade, which led back to her youth, she thought of Naomi’s preciously guarded virginity.
Perhaps (she thought) if they had a child, if Philip and Naomi lived together as man and wife, they would all have a greater hold upon him. A man with a real wife and children wasn’t as free as a man like Philip, who had no responsibilities (now that he’d become so strange), save those imposed by the law. Perhaps he would come to love Naomi and do things to please her. He’d come in time to want things from her. A thing like that did give you a hold over a man: it was a precarious hold, and you had to be very clever about it, but it was something, after all. If there was a child, she (Emma) could take charge of it when Philip and Naomi went back to the place God had ordained for them.
As she walked, the idea grew and grew. Why (she wondered) hadn’t it occurred to her before, as the one chance left? Naomi would hate it, and probably refuse at first, but she must be made to understand that it was her duty, not only as a wife (there were plenty of passages in the Bible to prove it), but as an agent of God. Why, it was almost another case of Esther and Ahasuerus, or even Judith and Holofernes. Look what they had done for God!
Yes, there was a chance of managing Philip, after all. If they fixed on him such new responsibilities, it might bring him to his senses.
Suddenly, in the midst of these torrential thoughts, she found herself at the very door of her own house, and, entering, she called out, “Naomi! Naomi!” in her loud, booming voice.
From her rocking-chair by the window, Naomi rose and answered her. She had been crying, perhaps all the afternoon, and her pale eyes were swollen and rimmed with red.
“Naomi,” she said, flinging aside her hat and jacket, “I’ve had a new idea about Philip. I think we’ve been wrong in our way of managing him.”
12
At the same moment, Philip was walking along the road that led out into the open country, talking, talking, talking to Mary Conyngham.
He had met her in a fashion the most natural, for he had gone to walk in the part of the town where Mary lived. There were odd, unsuspected ties between the people who lived on the Hill and those who lived in the Flats, and he had come to know of her return from Krylenko, his own foreman; for Krylenko had heard it from Irene Shane, who had seen Mary herself at the school that Irene kept alive in the midst of the Flats. Krylenko told him the news while they sat eating their breakfast out of tin pails and talking of Irene Shane. Once he heard it, there was no more peace for Philip: he thought about her while he worked, pulling and pushing great sheets of red-hot metal, while the thick smoke blew in at the windows of the cavernous shed. All through the morning he kept wondering what she was like, whether she had changed. He kept recalling her face, oval and dark, with good-humored blue eyes and dark hair pulled back in a knob at the back of her small head. That was the way he remembered her, and he tormented himself with doubts as to whether she had changed. She wasn’t a girl any longer; she was the mother of two children, and a widow. She had been through troubles with her husband.