Pelham stood his ground against the menacing stare. "I shall be glad to." There was a blank wrench of anguish within him, at the thought of leaving the familiar home; the mere difficulties of moving and settling again loomed mountain-high. "Your suggestion that I am going with bad companions is trash, and you know it." He hesitated, then drove on. "I'll leave by Saturday."
Paul turned away. "It will be a good thing."
His soul stinging with the father's injustice, he waited until the other had gone in leisurely certainty down the hill, and went in to his mother. "I'm to leave the mountain next Saturday, mother."
"It's necessary, Pelham. You have distressed your father in so many ways, I cannot see anything else for you to do."
Hurt pride spoke within him. "He said my late hours set a bad example for the boys."
The words crowded out. "He said that I was late because I was going with bad companions, when he knows that's a lie!"
"Pelham, you shall not speak that way of your father to me."
"Mother, you know I've been at meetings and debates; you know how straight I've been. If he'd had his way, I wouldn't have been," he added with heated significance.
"What do you mean?" The unrehearsed query came against her will.
"When I was visiting at the Meades, he advised me to go to Butler's Avenue, mother--to go to the Red Light district--to go to the women there. That was his fatherly advice to me!"
Her face assumed a Puritanic severity, an alien look; she masked the tumult of her heart with this outward symbol of incredulity. "I cannot believe you, Pelham."
This was not the first occasion in which he had detected Mary's mobile features solidified into a harsh and unreasoning insensibility to fact. Whenever he or one of the other children had cornered the mother into a situation demanding condemnation of Paul, this self-gorgonized expression hardened upon her; it hid any admission of surprise, any criticism of the husband, for the moment. And he had observed that it served a second function--persisted in, it gave time for the breach in the confidence in Paul to heal without apparent scar; henceforth she seemed to live in the self-imposed delusion that her husband had never been at fault. She would have held as a model wife the Red Queen, who had trained herself to believe six impossible things--presumably to her royal husband's advantage--before each breakfast.