“It's a fact that you kissed her.” Fanny leaned forward, flushed and tense, knocking over her stool. “And that you put your arms around her, and said—oh, I don't know what you did say. Did she mention me?”
“Only indirectly,” he replied with a gleam of malice; “neither of us did.”
“I am glad of that anyhow.” But her vindictive tone betrayed the words. “Although I can easily guess why you didn't—you were ashamed. You did kiss her; why won't you admit it?”
“What's the good? You've done that for me. You have convinced yourself so positively that nothing I could say would be of any use.”
“Did she call you Lee?”
“Hell, Fanny, what a God-forsaken lot of young nonsense!” His anger was mounting. “You can understand here as well as later that I am not going to answer any of it; and I'll not listen to a great deal more. Sometimes, lately, you have been insulting, but now you are downright pathetic, you are so ridiculous.”
“You will stay exactly where you are until I get done.” Her tone was perceptibly shriller. “And don't you dare call me pathetic; if you only knew—disgracing yourself in New York, with a family at home. It is too common and low and vulgar for words: like a travelling salesman. But I'll make you behave if I have to lock you up.”
Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose, no longer flushed, but white with wrath. “I won't have it!” Her voice was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp, there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury, a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare. This, he realized, was worse than he had anticipated; he saw no safe issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a wish to protect Fanny, from herself as much as anything; but he was powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without interest, his patience was rapidly vanishing. He was conscious of Fanny not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn.
His principal recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived together in an entire intimacy. Dissolved by his indifference, the past vanished like a white powder in a glass of water. She might have been a woman overtaken by a mental paroxysm in the cold impersonality of a railway station. “Stop it,” he commanded sharply; “you are hysterical, all kinds of a fool.”
“Only one kind,” she corrected him, in a voice so rasped that it might have come from a rusted throat; “and I'm not going to be it much longer. You have cured me, you and that Savina. But what—what makes me laugh is how you thought you could explain and lie and bully me. Anything would do to tell me, I'd swallow it like one of those big grapes.” She was speaking in gusts, between the labored heavings of her breast; her eyes were staring and dark; and her hands opened and shut, shut and opened, continuously. Fanny's cheeks were now mottled, there were fluctuating spots of red, blue shadows, on the pallor of her skin.