"We are too old for that."
"Yes, we old people have our own serial stories...."
"Yes.... A quiet life's the best...."
"Then you have nothing to reproach yourself with...."
He sees the slender, wand-like fingers tremble. Has she anything to reproach herself with, more than her infidelity to the man who was her husband? He has never seen it for himself; and yet the Thing has always and always dragged its ghostly veils rustling over dead leaves....
"Hasn't she been reading about that murder?"
"What murder?"
"In England, the woman who ..."
"No, no, she never reads me that sort of thing...."
Her words are almost an entreaty.... How old she is, how old she is!... The toothless mouth trembles and mumbles, the fingers shake violently. He is full of pity, he, the son, who knows and who suspects what he does not know, because he knows the soul of that mother, her soul now dulled and blunted in waiting for the body's death, but her soul also once a soul of passion, of temper, an amorous creole soul, capable at one moment of forgetting all the world and life itself for a single instant of rapture ... or perhaps of hate! He knows that she hated his father, after first adoring him; that she hated him because her own passion expired before him in a heap of ashes.... This had all been made clear to him, gradually, year after year, when he was no longer a child but grew into a man and was a man and understood and looked back and reflected and pieced together what he had understood and looked back upon.... He suspects, because he knows her soul. But how blunted that soul is now; and how old she is, how old she is! A pity softens his own soul, old, old, too, and full of melancholy for all the things of life gone by ... for his mother ... and for himself, an old man now.... How old she is, how old she is!... Hush, oh, hush: let her grow just a little older; and then it will be over and the Thing will have passed! The last fold of its spectral veil will have vanished; the last leaf on that endless, endless path will have rustled; and, though once a rumour, vaguely, with a dismal moaning, hovered through those trees, it never grew into a voice and an accusation and, from among those trees, no one ever stepped forward with threatening hand that stayed the Thing, the sombre, ghostly Thing, dragging itself along its long road, for years and years and years....