"You thought I knew—and—would go on just the same?"
The thing rose, a barricade to further thought. Jean tried to get by it, push it aside, go on to the end, but somehow she could not get any further. She was living in a world, among people who believed things like that. Men and women lived that way. People she knew lived that way. Not "cases," but friends, people she had eaten with, to whose houses she had gone, people whom she had been anxious to meet once, friends of her husband, of the man she had married.
Jean closed her eyes. It made her sick, physically sick to look at the little figure across the table, the hungry, contemptuous eyes, the fine lines etched by unsatisfied desire in the smooth skin. They did not belong in the same world, they did not speak the same language, and there they sat in Jean's home, at Jean's table, and talked of Jean's husband.
"You needn't look at me like that." The Kitten leaned across the table, so near that Jean saw clearly the smooth texture of her skin and the flecks of black in her eyes. "I don't see that you have such a lot to be proud of. I loved Franklin, I have always loved him, long before you came into his life at all. I loved him and I gave. You don't love him; you never did, and yet you married him. You took. You sold yourself for what? So you wouldn't have to teach school, to get away from that bromide mother, the whole monotonous round! A great motive, wasn't it? Oh, he's told me all about it?"
She spoke in quick, panting breaths, as if the words were coming faster than she could utter them. Jean felt as if little pellets of mud were being flung in her face. She moved now, pushing her chair away.
The Kitten laughed. "Oh, don't mind me, you can go clear over to the end of the room if you like. You have always acted like that, you know. It amused us terribly at first. You were so funny! You tried so hard to be nice to me and The Tiger and the rest of us, but you couldn't quite make it, could you? We were so awfully muddy and you were so clean. Clean! Good God, you're not clean, you're empty. Why, I wouldn't be you, you cold, dead thing, not for all the pain it would save me. You——"
Jean rose. The mud no longer came in pellets; it flowed, a black, sticky stream.
"I think you have said enough. After all, there really is nothing to be said."
She came slowly about the table and stood before The Kitten. She could almost hear the beating of The Kitten's heart, under the stubby hands pressed so tightly over it.
"Well," demanded The Kitten, "what are you going to do?"