"Used to be an artist chap down in Rio. On his uppers. One night, according to my description of what I imagined she looked like, he drew her. Yellow hair, I reckoned, and sure enough—"
"You're not worthy of the resemblance. It wouldn't be there if I had the saying."
"You haven't," he said, suddenly, his teeth snapping together as if biting off a thread.
"Nor you!" something that was the whiteness of fear lightening behind her mask. She rose then, lifting her chair out of the path toward the door and flinging her arm out toward it, very much after the manner of Miss Robinson in Act II.
"You get out, Morton," she said, "before I have you put out. They're closing the theater now. Get out!"
"Hattie," his calm enormous, "don't be hasty. A man that has come to his senses has come back to you humble and sincere. A man that's been sick. Take me back, Hattie, and see if—"
"Back!" she said, lifting her lips scornfully away from touching the word. "You remember that night in that little room on Peach Tree Street when I prayed on my knees and kissed—your—shoes and crawled for your mercy to stay for Marcia to be born? Well, if you were to lie on this floor and kiss my shoes and crawl for my mercy I'd walk out on you the way you walked out on me. If you don't go, I'll call a stage hand and make you go. There's one coming down the corridor now and locking the house. You go—or I'll call!"
His eyes, with their peculiar trick of solubility in his color scheme, seemed all tan.
"I'll go," he said, looking slim and Southern, his imperturbability ever so slightly unfrocked—"I'll go, but you're making a mistake, Hattie."
Fear kept clanging in her. Fire bells of it.