In an instant of passion Lee Randon caught Fanny by the shoulders and shook her until her head rolled as though her neck were broken. Even in his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped to see if this were true.
It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair, shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the door, she went out of the room.
Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its height, left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The silence—after the last audible dragging footfall of Fanny slowly mounting the stairs—was appalling: it was as though all the noise of all the world, concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and forever. He removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took up its spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had killed a great deal: the Lee Randon married to Fanny was already dead; Fanny, too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was a shame.
He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet; if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably weak. His feeling with regard to Fanny was confined to curiosity, but mainly his thoughts, his illimitable disgust, were directed at himself. His anger, returning like the night wind from a different direction, cut at himself, at the collapse of his integrity. He was, in reality, frightened at what had been no better than a relapse into a state of mania; he was shocked at the presence, however temporary, of a frenzy of madness.
Nothing had altered his attitude toward the woman who was his wife; all his active emotions for her had gone. Then his attention was drawn from his personality to his life, his surroundings; they were suffocating. Not to be borne! Nowhere could he discover a detail, an episode, that had the importance of reality. He had a sensation of being wrapped in a feather bed, the need to make a violent gesture—sending the white fluff whirling through space—and so be free to breathe. This house, the symmetrical copied walls, the harmonious rugs, symbols of public success and good opinion, the standard of a public approbation, exasperated him beyond endurance. He wanted to push the walls out, tear the rugs into rags, and scatter them contemptuously before the scandalized inertness of Eastlake. Lee had what was regarded as an admirable existence, an admirable family—the world imposed this judgment on him; and the desire, the determination, swept over him to smash to irremediable atoms what was so well applauded.
The thought fascinated him: to break his life wide open. He'd let it go, it was worthless to him, the companies and bonds and the woman and children, the jog-trotting on fenced roads, the vain pretentions of the country club, the petty grasping at the petticoats—where they were worn—of variety. Lee wished that he could do this in the presence of everyone he knew; he wanted to see their outraged faces, hear the shocked expressions, as he insulted, demolished, all that they worshipped. The blood, he found, had stopped; his hurt was relatively unimportant. The fever of rebellion, of destruction, increased in him until it was as violent, as blinding, as his earlier fury; and he went at once in search of Fanny.
She had undressed, and, in a nightgown effectively drawn with blue ribbons, she lay face down across the bottom of her bed. One shoulder, immaculately white except for the leaden bruises of his fingers, was bare, and an arm, from which her jewelled wrist watch had not been removed, was outstretched. He stood above her, but, breathing faintly, she made no sign of a consciousness of his presence.
“Fanny,” he began, speaking with an effort of calmness out of his laboring being, “this is all over for me. As I told you so many times, I've had too much of it. It's yours, anyhow, and the children are yours, and you may do what you like with the whole affair. I'm done.” Still she didn't move, reply. “I am going,” he said more impatiently, “tonight. I want you to understand that this is final. You were too good a wife; I couldn't keep even with you; and I can't say, now, that I want to. Everyone will tell you that I am no good—you see, I haven't the shadow of a cause for leaving—and the best thing you can do is believe them. If I had what was recognized as a reason for going, I'd stay, if that has any sense; you may put your own interpretation on it.”
She turned and half rose, regarding him from the edge of the bed. Her face, no longer brightly mottled, was sunken, and dull with despair. “I can't talk,” she said; “the words are all hard like stones down in my heart. You'll have to go; I can't stop you; I knew you had gone yesterday, or was it last week? I saw it was a hopeless fight but I tried, I had to; I thought your memory would help.”