"I should be glad to know, Sir," I said coldly, "why in an ordinary sensible house, which is neither yours nor mine, you are favouring me with these extraordinary speeches. You have not the advantage of my acquaintance, nor I of yours. Is it Madame the Countess de Florian you called to see?"
"Ah true, true!"—there was no change of voice or manner, but a change (I felt) of person inside him—"Yes: I am an old friend of the family; I came over from Rouen, through which I was passing, and learn from the servant that by a piece of ill-fortune the family are in Rouen today. Here is my card."
I took it, without looking at it.
"I am an English friend who lives here," I said, "a kind of companion to the girls."
"Indeed, indeed! As I was saying"—and impatient of the length of this irrelevant interruption of his ravings, he half-closed his eyes again and resumed the tirade of piety and denunciation and woman-hating and hell-fire. He was mad. He was not mad. All the world was mad. It was not happening.
I was working myself up to face again the experience of his eyes, when my glance lighted accidentally on the visiting card in my hand.
The news entered my soul before my brain. It was not news; I had known it all the time. I stared at the printed letters one by one, not able to understand them, understanding them all too well. They stood up from the card, assumed hideous shapes. It was a nightmare. It was not true. I clutched at the side of the bed—no, it was the dining-room table against which I was leaning. There were the chair, the sideboards, the armour; there was he.
In my visions of this meeting I had always taken him unawares and now it was I who had been surprised. The second part of my dreams at any rate should not fail. I gripped the whip more tightly.
In crowding tumult every word of my Grandmother's old narration filled my heart and brain. I was ten years old again. She called me upstairs to her bedroom, pulled out the brown tin box from under the bed, drew forth the packet. Each phrase of each pitiful letter was marshalled by my inhuman memory before my eyes. Bitch, Bitch, he called her Bitch. As I looked at the white halo-crowned vile beautiful face before me, as he raved away, I did not listen: one by one I went over the ill-deeds and the cruel words I had to his account, feverishly I visualized my mother's suffering and sorrow till I was at the white heat for avenging them. The hardest part was to keep calm, sane: to keep my will in control of my emotions, which were bursting through all the ancient bonds of self-restraint, urging me tempestuously to await no perfectly planned moment, but to wound him now.