Once he did hear his voice saying aloud "My boy ... mine ..."; but even then, his passion for truth outweighing indulgence to self, he knew that it was the mere mechanical speech of the situation rising to his lips unconsciously. He said the words again to try and get at exactly what their import was. "Mine...." All that had struck him while Archelaus had been lying watching him read the letters was "This couldn't happen to a woman ... how unfairly it's arranged ... it's only a man this could happen to ..."; and that had shown him how small, after all, was the man's share, that such a thing could be possible. Him or another, it really did not seem to matter so very much. Both he and Archelaus had had Phoebe. That this spark of life should have been from him or from Archelaus ... was that, after all, so important? It seemed such a small share. Fatherhood, looked at dispassionately, seemed to him a thing very artificial in its convention. Life, that there should be life--yes, that was different, but not that it should have been from him or another on that particular occasion.... When one thought that both had equally possessed the woman they seemed to merge so in her personality as to lose individual personalities of their own. If he had not kept away from Phoebe for those two months, thus, in the light of her letter, putting the matter beyond doubt, how would any of the three of them ever have known whose son Nicky was? Women always said they knew, even when they were going equally with two men; but did they? Was it not rather that they always decided it was the child of the man they cared for most? And if conditions had all along been normal between him and Phoebe, then how would he have felt in the light of his brother's avowal? It would have been impossible to say whether the child had been his or his brother's; and yet Nicky would have been himself, even as he was now, and he, Ishmael, would have felt the same about him, and nothing would have been really different any more than if he had never known; or, knowing that there was doubt, still could not have told for certain which of the two it was who had fathered Nicky. How, then, was it different now that he did know beyond a doubt? Nicky was the same.... Ishmael clung on to that. Nicky was the same. Then--and the light came sliding into his heart with a sensation of easing--if Nicky were the same, then the truth might be the same too; all that he had lived by not be the more overset than was the Nicky he had known and loved all these years. Though Nicky was not what was called his son, all he had built upon Nicky might not be valueless any more than Nicky himself had become valueless, or one jot of his character or personality been overthrown.... Nicky stood where he had; then why not more than Nicky? These were the eternal verities, not the mere accident of fatherhood.