for the children. They're your children, too. I'll learn to cook . . . I'll do anything!"
He did not answer her. He simply sat staring out of the window like an image carven of stone. And he was saying to himself all the while, "I can't yield. I daren't do it. I can't—not now." And all the while he felt a kind of disgust for the nakedness of this love of Naomi's. It was a shameful thing. And during all their life together he had thought her incapable of such love.
She kept moaning and saying, over and over again, "I've got nothing now. I'm all alone . . . I've got nothing now."
He rose, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "I'm going now, Naomi. I'm not going to the restaurant. I'll come back this afternoon. It'll be all right. We'll work it out somehow."
She looked up at him. "You've changed your mind?"
"No, I don't mean that. No, it's better this way."
"I'll show you, Philip, what a good wife I can be."
He picked up his hat, Jim Baxter's hat, and suddenly he thought, "The old Philip is dead—as dead as Jim Baxter. Ive dared to do it."
Aloud he said, "Let's not talk any more now. I'll be back in an hour or two when you feel better."
Then he went away, and outside the house, among the lilacs, he was suddenly sick.
He found a tiny flat of three rooms over a drugstore halfway up the hill from the railway station. It had been occupied by the family of a salesman who traveled
