Now, for the first time, I saw her really angry, not childishly petulant as in her orange-throwing mood, but shaken to her depth with rage. She was rather terrible, glaring at Masters with a grim face.
“Am I?” he said, coolly striking a chord. “We’ll see Tuesday night in Brooklyn.”
I had expected him to answer her in kind, but he only seemed weary and dispirited. Her chest rose with a deep breath and I saw to my alarm that she had grown paler.
“You didn’t always think that,” she said in a muffled voice.
“No,” he answered quietly, “I believed in you at first.”
He spread his hands in a long clutching movement and struck another chord. It fell deep into the momentary silence as if his powerful fingers were driving it down like a clencher on his words.
“And you don’t any more?”
“No, I’ve about done believing,” he responded.
She ran at him and seized him by the shoulder. He jerked it roughly out of her grasp and twirling round on the stool faced her, exasperated, defiant, a man at the end of his patience. But his eyes said more, full of a steely dislike. She met them and panted:
“You can’t, you don’t. Even you couldn’t be so mean—” then she stopped, it seemed to me as if for the first time conscious of the hostility of his gaze. There was the pause of the realizing moment and when she burst out her voice was strangled with passion: