Adam walks into Kate's office

A telegram of four words reaches Tom alone at the ranch; he lays out his dark suit and turns his face to the wall. After the burial Adam stays behind among the white violets, walks the muddy mile into Salinas soaked through, and drinks brandy, hot rum and fifty-year-old Jamaica at the Abbot House until he asks the way to Kate's. In her silk-lined office, blond again and thickening, Kate keeps a revolver under a sheet of paper. Adam looks at her and finds he is free: he remembers her face but has never seen it, and can forget it now. Goaded, she drinks the rum she says poisons her, and everything comes out — her contempt, the man she laughed at through the door, the envelopes of flash-lit photographs of a senator, a councilman, a minister. She offers herself, then tells him Charles may be the twins' father. Adam says it would not matter, and it doesn't. She screams for the house pimp, who knocks him down but will not use the boots on a man with no fight left.

The confrontation reverses the first one: this time Adam is drunk and calm, and Kate loses control of the room. Steinbeck gives her the whole indictment of humanity to make and defeats it with one line, said twice — it doesn't matter — because Adam has stopped needing her to be anything. Samuel's funeral opens the chapter so the medicine is in mind while it works.