“Make me uncomfortable, then,” he retorted; “I think that's what I'm sick of—your eternal gabbling about comfort and dinner. Let the God damn furnace go out! Or burn up.”
“That's all I have, Lee,” she said helplessly; “it is my life. I tried, the last month, to be different, after watching you with gayer women; but it only made me miserable; I kept wondering if Gregory was covered up and if the car would start when you wanted to go home. But I won't be sorry for it.” Her head was up, her cheeks blazing. “I know, and so ought you, what being good is. And if you forget it you will have a dreadful misfortune. God is like that: He'll punish you.”
“You don't need help,” he commented brutally.
Detached tears rolled over her cheeks. “I won't cry,” she contradicted the visible act; “I won't. You take such a cowardly advantage of me.”
The advantage, he reflected, was entirely on her side. Within, he was hard, he had no feeling of sympathy for her; the division between them was absolute. With an angry movement she brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I hate her,” she said viciously; “she is a rotten detestable woman.”
“On the contrary,” he replied, “Mrs. Grove, if you happen to mean her, is singularly attractive. There is no smallness about her.”
“Hell,” she mocked him, “it is really too touching. When shall you see her again?”
“Never.” At once he saw that he had made a second mistake.
“How sad—never; I can't bear it. You both must have been wretched at that long hopeless parting. And she agreed to let you go—back to your wife and children.” Fanny's voice was a triumph of contempt. “I ought to thank her; or be magnanimous and send you back.”
“This is all built on a ridiculous assumption,” Lee reminded her; “I even forget how we started. Suppose we talk about something else; Mrs. Grove, as a topic, is pretty well exhausted.” Fanny, narrow-eyed, relapsed into an intent silence. She faded from his mind, her place taken by Savina. Immediately he was conscious of a quickening of his blood, the disturbed throb of his heart; the memory of delirious hours enveloped him in a feverish mist more real than his wife sitting before him with a drawn brow.