She fell a-brooding.
The long silence made the youth uneasy:
“Polly, don’t you see——”
“Urgh!” She swung round upon him savagely—growling as a leopard might: “Stop that awful bleating. Your voice turns my blood acid—is like some filthy stench to me.... If you value your life, keep that dreadful voice still.... Let me think. In God’s name, let me think.... What to do? that’s the bewildering thing. You, who make me stand a-wonder how I suffered myself to let you touch me—you, with your dreadful idiot’s stare and slack mouth (Mother of God, I too must be a living idiot!)—you have robbed me for months to come even of benefiting by the basest traffic in which a woman may barter herself.”
Of a sudden she turned to the door:
“Go,” she said hoarsely—“go away—or I shall do you an injury. Quick! I can descend to no more foul shame than I have now known. Go—and, as you love yourself, I say, don’t let me hear that awful bleat again.”
He walked out of the room in his weak-kneed way, huffily, and was gone.
She stood listening there, until all echo of him, dandified, weak-kneed, had passed out of her ears.
And when the world was become wholly silent, the tense mood passed. She sank to the seat of the sofa and bent her brows on the problem, what to do? Before her was blackness. No writing across the sullen sky.
As she sat thus in the gloom, scowling at cruelty, a key turned in the lock outside, there was the loud slam of the outer door, a heavy step or so, and a man’s figure entered into the dusk of the room.