I stopped. I wanted to ask her if she was starving by slow degrees and needed help. Lord knows the careworn look about her didn't show it was luxurious living she was doing—at least not lately.
"Look," I said suddenly. "Would you like to go home to Earth? I could fix—"
But that was the wrong approach. Her eyes snapped and her shoulders stiffened angrily and the words that ripped out of her mouth were not coated with honey.
"Get the hell out of here, you fool!"
I blinked again. When the flame in her eyes suddenly seemed to grow even hotter, I turned on my heel and went to the door. I opened it, went out on the top slab step. I turned back to close the door—and looked straight into her eyes.
She was crying, but that didn't mean exactly what it looked like it might mean. Her right hand had the door edge gripped tightly and she was swinging it with all the strength she possessed. And while I still stared, the door slammed savagely into the casing with a shock that jarred the slab under my feet, and flying splinters from the rotten woodwork stung my flinching cheeks.
I shrugged and turned around and went down the steps. "And that is the way it goes," I muttered disgustedly to myself. Thinking to be helpful with the firewood problem, you give a woman a nice sharp axe and she immediately puts it to use—on you.
I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something in his eyes which might have been a leer.
"Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?" he said. He chuckled hoarsely in his throat. "Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it." His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said complainingly: