because by this he had been offered his freedom?
Thurston marry his sister? ... He could go his own way now. Even his
father could not expect him to remain.

And he wanted Maggie--urgently, passionately. Standing for a moment
there in the dark passage he wanted her. He was lonely, disregarded,
despised.

They did not care for him here, no one cared for him anywhere--only
Maggie who was clear-eyed and truthful and sure beyond any human being
whom he had ever known. Then, with a very youthful sense of challenging
this world that had so grossly insulted him by admitting Thurston into
the heart of it, he joined the tea-party. There in the pink, close,
sugar-smelling, soft atmosphere sat his mother, Amy, Mrs. Alweed and
little Miss Pyncheon. His mother, with her lace cap and white hair and
soft plump hands, was pouring tea through a strainer as though it were
a rite. On her plate were three little frilly papers that had held
sugary cakes, on her lips were fragments of sugar. Amy, in an ugly grey
dress, sat severely straight upon a hard chair and was apparently
listening to Miss Pyncheon, but her eyes, suspicious and restless,
moved like the eyes of a newly captured animal. Mrs. Alweed, stout in
pink with a large hat full of roses, smiled and smiled, waiting only
for a moment when she could amble off once again into space safe on the
old broad back of her family experiences, the only conversational steed
to whose care she ever entrusted herself. She had a son Hector, a
husband, Mr. Alweed, and a sister-in-law, Miss Alweed; she had the
greatest confidence in the absorbed attention of the slightest of her
acquaintances. "Hector, he's my boy, you know--although why I call him
a boy I can't think--because he's twenty-two and a half--he's at
Cambridge, Christs College--well, this morning I had a letter ..." she
would begin. She began now upon Martin. His mind wandered. He looked
about the little room and thought of Thurston. Why was he not more
angry about it all? He had pretended to be indignant, he had hated
Thurston as he stood there ... But had he? Half of him hated him. Then
with a jerk Thurston's words came back to him: "There's two of each of
us, that's the truth of it." "Two of each of us ..." Sitting there,
listening to Mrs. Alweed's voice that flowed like a river behind him,
he saw the two figures, saw them quite clearly and distinctly, flesh
and blood, even clothes and voices and smile. And he knew that all his
life