You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you ridiculing and reviling the people of your church, whose money supports you, and making a mock of the things they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn't dare let them know you didn't believe in.You talked to us slightingly about your wife.What were you thinking of, not to comprehend that that would disgust us? You showed me once--do you remember?--a life of George Sand that you had just bought,--bought because you had just discovered that she had an unclean side to her life.You chuckled as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something dirty that older people had learned not to notice.
These are merely random incidents.They are just samples, picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which have been opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake.
I can understand that all the while you really fancied that you were expanding, growing, in all directions.
What you took to be improvement was degeneration.
When you thought that you were impressing us most by your smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog.
And it wasn't even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!"She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap, and her eyes sinking to the floor.
A silence ensued.Then Theron reached a groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless, automatic step to the door.
He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him.
He slammed the door to, and turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind.He came toward her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his movements, and in the wild look upon his white, set face.
Halting before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the upturned face with its simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings upon the clasped fingers, with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of passion.
"This is what you have done to me, then!"His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears--hoarse and broken, but with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage.The horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light--red and abnormally evil.It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of which the first-fruit was Cain.Why should he not kill her? In all ages, women had been slain for less.Yes--and men had been hanged.Something rose and stuck in his dry throat;and as he swallowed it down, the sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into darkness.
The world was all black again--plunged in the Egyptian night which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without form and void.He was alone on it--alone among awful, planetary solitudes which crushed him.
The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was plain enough to his eyes.It was an illusion.
She was really a star, many millions of miles away.
These things were hard to understand; but they were true, none the less.People seemed to be about him, but in fact he was alone.He recalled that even the little child in the car, playing with those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do with him.Take his money, yes;take all he would give her--but not smile at him, not come within reach of him! Men closed the doors of their houses against him.The universe held him at arm's length as a nuisance.
