Suddenly she found herself upon her feet, speaking words. The words came from subconscious depths, not directed by intellect or by will, but by the deep-lying soul, by the living, indestructible thing which was herself. Disgust emanated from her.
“You toad!” she heard herself say. “You white, dreadful toad! You dare to say such words to me! You dare to sit there appraising me, coveting me! You ask me to be your wife—your wife!... You are unspeakably horrible—can’t you see how horrible you are?” She heard her voice arguing with him, trying to impress him with his own horribleness. “You dreadful, fat little creature! A credit to you!... I can think of no woman so low, so degraded, so unnatural as to be a credit to what you are. A woman of the streets would refuse you. Your touch would be death to her soul—to what fragment of soul she retained.... How dare you insult me so?...” The words would not stop, the dreadful words. She did not wish to utter them, knew their utterance served no purpose, but they continued to flow as water from a broken spout. She rent and tore him, holding him up to the light of the stars for himself to see. It was a dreadful thing to do to any human being; to sink one’s claws into his body, searching for and finding and rending the soul.
She saw him turn the color of his vest; saw him shrink, compress within himself, crumple, sag like a punctured football. She saw an ugly glint in his little, narrowed eyes; understood how she had put upon him the supreme affront of stripping him of his pretense and showing him to himself as he knew he was. She stood him before his own eyes, stark, horribly vivid; showed him secrets he concealed even from himself. Yet it was not Carmel who did this thing, but some uncontrollable force within her, some force fighting the battle of womanhood.... He got unsteadily to his feet and backed away from her mouthing. He stumbled, recovered, felt behind him for the door.
“Damn you!” he cried shrilly. “Damn you!... You—you’ll suffer for this....”
Then he was gone and she found herself kneeling with her face upon the seat of her chair, shaken by sobs.
CHAPTER XI
IN the morning Carmel Lee had made up her mind. She did not know she had made up her mind, but it was none the less true. Her mind was of the sort which makes itself up upon slight provocation and then permits its owner to reason and argue and apply the pure light of reason to the problem in hand—a sort of ex post facto deliberation. As may have been noted, the salient characteristic of this young woman was a certain impetuosity, a stubborn impulsiveness. Once her mind made itself up to a certain course of action, nothing short of an upheaval of nature could turn her from it. But, notwithstanding, she considered herself to be of a schooled deliberation. She believed she had impressed this deliberation upon herself, and was confident she reasoned out every matter of importance gravely and logically.
Now, having determined just what she would do about the cache of whisky she had discovered, she sat down before her desk to determine what it was best to do.
So enraged, so shaken, had she been by her encounter with Abner Fownes the evening before, that it was necessary for her to take action against somebody or something. She could not demolish Fownes, and nobody else was handy, so she turned to the whisky and vented her anger and disgust upon that.
While she sat before her desk pretending to herself that she was deliberating, Evan Bartholomew Pell came into the office, nodded curtly, and dropped in his chair. Carmel, of a sudden, seized paper and commenced to write. As she set down word after word, sentence after sentence, she became uneasily aware of some distracting influence. Upon looking up she identified this extraneous force as the eyes of Evan Pell. He was staring at her fixedly.