Mr. Farley said, "I don't know! I don't know! You know what you want, Laurence." He felt that no one but himself understood growing old. What his wife knew of old age he did not regard as knowledge. She was old without understanding it. He had stopped writing to Helen without ever having made any definite proposal to her. He felt obliged to send her checks for their boy, but if she did not acknowledge them, though it hurt him, he was glad. He tried not to think of her. His conviction of age was born of knowledge that was deep in his flesh, and so it was good. It was beyond doubt. It was his. He felt, without being able to express it, that truth was at the end of things. And that what he had come to now was truth because there was nothing more. It was the end of life. He felt that some day it would matter very little whether Laurence went abroad or not. Alice's restless eccentricity troubled Mr. Farley like a dream, but he knew that her unrest would grow weak like his own. She would know truth as he knew it. When he left the living-room where he had been with Laurence and Alice, Alice said, "Papa Farley walks as though he were a hundred." "Maybe he is." "You're very cryptic, Laurence." "I'm tired, Alice." "Well, you haven't grown tired through exerting yourself on behalf of any one else," Alice said sharply. "Nor have you, I think." "I've done something for _your_ children." "I wish God had provided you with a family, Alice." Tears rose to Alice's dull, ravaged eyes. She stared at him helplessly. "Good God!" she said at last. "And what are you?" Laurence sat very still and unmoved, smiling, his pipe between his teeth, but his lip trembled in a sneer. "Heaven forbid that I should be expected to know!" he said. Alice could not bear him near her. She went out, her heavy hips swinging with a kind of reluctant determination under her dingy rough cloth skirt, her broad, fleshy shoulders defiantly set. Laurence noted, familiarly, wondering why it hurt him, how her wet, brown hair was half combed, tucked askew; and that her collar was off the band of her blouse at the nape of her neck, showing a patch of swarthy skin. She rushed up the stairs and he could hear her slam the door of her room. He almost imagined he could hear her shriek as he had one time at night. * * * * * When Laurence talked to Alice about going away, she said, "Good God! Go anywhere! If you had had any guts you would have gone before this." Mrs. Farley, hearing this, was afraid of Alice's violence, yet hoarded the consciousness of the weakness to which it confessed. Alice's face was already debauched with some secret passion. Mrs. Farley grew hard and strong against it. "You mustn't mention Mr. Ridge in Alice's presence," she told Laurence one day. When she said it she looked strong and secret.