“I only pray, boy,” she went on, “that you’ll never meet a woman who’ll love you as I loved him down there. If you do, you’ll kill her with the Ann Haggard in your brain. We’re all of us flinty enough, boy⁠—base and flinty; but I’ve never met a person who gloried in it as your mother does! Oh, love him, boy! Love him, love him, as I’ve loved him for twenty-five years!”

Wolf lurched to his feet and stood erect. The struggle that had been going on so long within him between his father and his mother had reached a crisis. He had come here to range himself with that skull, to cry to it for a sign in his trouble; but this woman’s desperation had wrought a change in him. His mother’s words of yesterday rose up in his mind. His father must have lodged himself like an undying snake in Miss Gault’s bosom! Would it be with his mother or with his father that he would range himself now, were this accusing creature with the pendulous lip and the vast black lap the very Judgement of God? With which of them? With which of them?

With his mother! Out of that hard, ironic flesh he had been torn. Good or bad, he was on her side. Good or bad, he would be judged with her!