“No more so than what you propose!”
Durkin, drawing back from her, closed his right fist and with it pounded angrily on the palm of his left hand.
“If you’re going to back down I will go to Lydia Van Schaick, and I’ll get her money, too. I’ll go as a second-story man, as a porch-climber! I’ll go after that money as a common burglar and house-breaker. But I’ll get it, in the end, or know the reason why!”
“Oh!” she gasped, horrified. “You wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”
“I say I will!” he cried, in a passion.
“Oh, you couldn’t!” she reiterated.
“Couldn’t I?—I’ve got this machinery started, and it’s going to be kept moving!”
Something in the scene carried her years back, to the times when her father, emerging from his prolonged orgies, sick and shaken, stormed and wept for the brandy she struggled to keep away from him—and the struggle would end only, when in fear of his collapse, she surrendered the bottle to his quivering fingers.
“My God—I’ve got to have it!” Durkin was crying and storming.
There crept over her the same, slowly eviscerating pity for the defiant man who now stood before her, so tragically weak in his very protests of strength.