“Oh, very well. You asked the question, I was trying to answer it, that’s all.”
Mrs. Lawson bit her lip. She was furious. “As long as you’ve said what you have, you’d better go on with it,” she said acidly.
“There isn’t any more,” returned Dorothy. “That’s all there is.”
“But surely he must have given you reasons for your assertion.” Mrs. Lawson had walked beautifully into Dorothy’s trap. Her own plan to snare an unsuspecting girl had been blotted out by the shadow of the Green Goddess, Jealousy. “Tell me what my husband did or said to make you fear him, and tell me at once.”
“It wasn’t what he did, Mrs. Lawson—it was the way he looked.”
“What do you mean—the way he looked?”
Dorothy had thrust a painful knife into the mental cosmos of her adversary. Now she deliberately turned it in the wound. “Very probably,” she said quietly, looking her straight in the eyes, “you can remember how Mr. Lawson looked when he first made love to you. I don’t want to be made love to, and I don’t like him, Mrs. Lawson.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him to leave me—and when he would not go, I simply walked into my bathroom and locked the door.”
“But what happened the next time he came? Martin went in to see you every day, didn’t he?”