I rose with shaking knees. It was the critical moment of her fate and mine.
“Don’t you want to?” I almost whispered, drawing near her.
Her answer made me stop short. It came with a tremor of fierce inner feeling, revolt, rage and desperation, seething into expression:
“Oh God, how I hate it all!”
“Hate what—marriage?”
“No, everything that’s around me. Those women, this damnable work—no money—no hope! I’m crazy with the misery of it. It’s like being bound down and smothered. I want to get out. I want to be free. I want to do what I like and be myself. You’re trying to make me into some one else. You’re crushing me and killing me. I’d rather be dead in my grave than go on this way.”
She burst into frantic tears, savage, racking, snatching the curtain about her and sobbing and strangling behind it. The room was nearly dark and I could see the long piece of drapery swaying as she clutched it to her. I tried to pluck it away, and through its folds, felt her body shaken and bent like a tree in a tempest. I had never heard such weeping, moans and wails, with words coming in inarticulate bursts. I was frightened, caught her hand and drew her out of the curtain which hung askew from torn fastenings. She pushed me away and threw herself on the sofa, where, under the vast circumference of her hat, she lay prone, abandoned to the storm.
I stood helplessly regarding her, then as broken sentences came from under her hat, took out the pins and held it before me like a shield, while she gasped in choked reiteration that we were killing her, that she hated us all, that she’d rather die than give another lesson. If her paroxysm hadn’t been so devastating I would have lost my temper at the outrageous injustice of such sentences as I could catch. I tried to say something of this in a tempered form, but she shut me off with an extended hand, beating it at me, calling out strangled execrations at Betty and Mrs. Ashworth and the mother of her pupil. If any one who did not know the situation had heard her, they would have thought those worthy and disinterested women had been plotting her ruin.
There was nothing for me to do but wait till her passion spent itself, which it began to do in sighs and quivering breaths that shook her from head to foot. When I saw it was moderating I told her I would get her some wine and went to the kitchenette, leaving her with drenched face and tangled hair, a piteous spectacle. In a few moments I was back with the wine-glass. The room was empty—she had gone leaving the black hat.
I picked it up and sat down on the sofa. We certainly had got to the climax.