She looked off, wanting not to color.
"Come," he said, "I apologize. Read. I'm as predisposed as I can be toward anything conceived by that little dormouse of a person in the office."
"That's the trouble. You men are too often satisfied with a surface inventory. The vault of heart sometimes yields up rare treasures."
"How like you to say that."
"Ready?"
"Go!"
And so, with her head bent so that the light burnished its smoothness, she read him "The Web" through two uninterrupted hours, her voice throbbing into the quiet. In the third act, when a half-crazed victim of the third degree is led out in shuddering and horrible invocation, she sprang to her feet for an instant, her gesture decrying its fullest arc.
She was like Iphigenia praying for death, he thought.
Later, when the shades of the prison house begin to dawn upon the stunned consciousness of the woman, there were tears in her voice and on her lashes, and one fell to the back of her hand, which she wiped off against her skirt, like a child.
At eleven o'clock she finished, regarding him brilliantly through her flush.