Her hand went tugging up to her breast and she said with passionate resentment:
“You ought never to say a thing like that to me.”
His blood boiled into a fury and he turned on her, but she was gone. He wrestled with himself, toiled and labored to regain his will, the mastery of his thoughts and his feelings. The jealousy died away, but no other emotion came to take its place. He regained his will, saw clearly again, but was more possessed by his irony than before. He was no longer its master, no longer drifting comfortably, but its slave, whirled hither and thither at its caprice—and it was like a hot gusty wind blowing in him before a storm. All the color of the world was heavy and metallic, but it was painted color, a painted world. He was detached from himself, from Matilda, and he and she passed into the puppet show in the miserable liberty of the gaily painted dolls: free only in being out of the crowd, sharing none of the crowd’s energy, having no part in any solidarity.
He made himself a bed on the hard horsehair sofa in their room and lay hour by hour staring at the window panes, listening to the distant thud and thunder of the sea, watching for the light to come to make plain the window and show up the colors of the painted world.
In the morning they avoided each other, and she spent the day with the knitting woman, he with Edwin Watts, and, when, at night, she returned from the theater, he was asleep. It was the first time they had strangled a day, and it lay cold and dark between them. He admitted perfectly that he was at fault, but to say that he was sorry was a mockery and an untruth. He was not sorry, for he felt nothing.
They bore the burden of their sullen acquiescence in silence into the third day, and then she said:
“If you want me to go, I’ll go.”
“No! No! I’ll go.”
Silence had been torture, but speech was racking. They were at the mercy of words, and there was an awful finality about the word go which neither desired and yet neither could qualify. . . . Plainly she had been weeping, but that exasperated him. She, at any rate, had found an outlet, and he had discovered none. And all the time he was haunted by the futility, the childishness of it all.
“Where will you go?” she asked.