"And who put him in this state?" I charged directly, vividly remembering what Hartman had said....
"What, you don't mean to insinuate?"—she gasped.
"I mean nothing, only that I have come home to take care of my father, till his lodge takes charge of him, and that, for the present, I want you to please leave me alone with him."
Her small, black pupils dilated angrily. But she did not press the point of her staying. She had put her hand on my arm cajolingly, but I had shook it off with such evident disgust—founded partly and secretly on a horror of physical attraction for her—that drew my morbid, starved nature—
"Very well!... but I'll be back this afternoon, early. When he wakes up and asks for a drink of whiskey ... starts out to get one ... draw him a glass of water from the faucet, and take your oath that it's whiskey ... he'll believe you and drink it!"
And she departed, an odor of strong perfume in her wake.
Had this planet of earth been populated from without?... there were evidently two races on it—the race of men—the race of women—men had voyaged in from some other world in space women had done the like from their world ... to this world, alien to both of them. And here a monstrous thing had brought them together like an interlocking fungus—their sex-union ... a function that monstrously held together two different species of animals that should not even be on meeting terms.
Thus my morbid fancy ran, as I entered slowly my father's room.
He slept.