“Well, then, tell me what your grandfather, and your great-grandfather died of. When you married me did you bother to enquire what illness carried off my mother? Don’t you suppose that we should find enough consumptives and syphilitics among our ancestors to poison the universe?”
“You go too far, Thérèse, let me tell you. Even when you’re joking and trying to get a rise out of me, you ought to respect the family.”
He positively gobbled with annoyance, trying to be impressive and, at the same time, not to look foolish. But she persisted:
“Really, our families make me laugh: they’re too ridiculous. They’re terribly shocked when a thing like this is publicly known, but they’re quite indifferent to all the horrors no one talks about.... Why, you yourself use the expression ‘secret diseases,’ don’t you? Surely the diseases most dangerous to the race are just precisely those. Our families never think of them, though they are so very clever at bundling anything unpleasant out of sight. If it wasn’t for the servants we should know nothing about them: fortunately there are the servants....”
“I shan’t answer you. When you start off like this, the best thing to do is to wait until you’ve finished. With me, it doesn’t matter so very much. But it won’t do at all at home, you know. We don’t make jokes about the family.”
The family! Thérèse let her cigarette go out. With staring eyes, she saw before her that cage with its innumerable and living bars, a cage set with ears and eyes, in which she would crouch motionless, her chin on her knees, and her arms clasping her legs, and wait for death.
“Come, come, Thérèse, don’t look like that: if you could see yourself....”
She smiled and put on her mask again.
“I wasn’t serious ... how silly you are, darling.” But when Bernard tried to come near to her in the taxi, she evaded him and kept him off.
The last evening before they returned home, they went to bed at nine o’clock. Thérèse took a cachet, but she was too impatient for sleep and it would not come. For an instant, her mind began to sink beneath the surface when Bernard, with unintelligible mumblings, turned over; and she felt his great fiery body against her own. She pushed it from her and, shrinking from that odious warmth, she lay on the extreme edge of the bed: but after a few minutes, he again rolled towards her as if the flesh in him survived his absent spirit and, even in sleep, fumbled for its accustomed prey. She again thrust him back, roughly this time, but he did not wake.... Oh! if she could push him away once and for all, hurl him out of bed into the darkness!