"The lust for fight."
She shuddered.
"I wasn't prepared for it. Another time I should be. It was an ugly devil—but I loved it."
She was silent, and after a moment he asked her, in his old anxious, friendly tone, "Have I hurt you?"
"No. But somehow it seems as if you'd gone away."
"I know. I'm still communing with that brute in me—the fighting brute. I must be honest with you. I can't help thinking he'd give me a special kind of pleasure."
"Would he?" She asked it wistfully. He had opened the windows of their house to strange discords from without. "What kind of pleasure?"
He was glad to tell. The magnitude and newness of his emotion that day made it something to be flaunted while the disturbed currents of his blood kept their fervor. Later he might put it to the test of equable judgment. Now it was all a glory of hot action.
"Playmate," he said, "I wanted to kill him."
"My father? Oh, why, why?"