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 and I wouldn't have, even then, but she came to my room without my asking her."

For a moment, she wanted to lie down in the snow and, burying her face in it, cry and cry. She managed to say, "I wasn't even thinking of her. Honestly I wasn't, Philip. And I believe you."

"If that's so, why do you sulk and not say anything?"

"I wasn't sulking. I only thought you didn't want to talk just now."

"I hate it when you act like a martyr." This time she was silent, and he added, "I suppose all women do it . . . or most women . . . it's what Ma does when she wants to get her way. I hate it."

She thought, "He said 'most women' because he meant all women but Lily Shane." But she was silent. They did not speak again until they reached the slate-colored house.

It wasn't really Naomi who lay at the bottom of his irritation, but the thought of his father. The return troubled him. Why should he have come now after twenty-six years? It was, he thought, almost indecent and unfair, in a way, to his mother. He tried, when he was not talking to Naomi, to imagine what he must be like—a man who Emma said had gone out to China to make money for his wife and child, a man who adored her and worshipped his son. He was troubled, because the moral image created by his mother seemed not to fit the enlarged, physical portrait in the parlor. In these last years he had come to learn a lot about the world and about people, and one of the things he had learned was that people are like their faces. His mother was like her large, rather coarse and energetic face;