She looked at him thoughtfully. His forehead was high and broad, she thought, and his hands— Their days in the wilderness rushed back over her. She was angry at the memories they brought her, and doubly angry at Lawrence, as if he only were responsible.
"It's inconceivable," she said calmly, "that you, without seeing, can really carve anything true to form and line." In her voice was incredulity and unbelief.
He rose suddenly, his face white, and said, with an intensity that startled her: "That sentiment is as familiar to me as my name. I have heard it from sight-bigoted people from the days when I made my first attempt to go back to my school work. I am rather weary of it."
She sat staring at him for a moment, then she laughed. She could not have told why she did it, and she was instantly sorry. The blood rushed to his face.
"I shall create that which will forever assure you that I can carve true to the most familiar form and line you know," he said fiercely.
Her face was as crimson as his now, though she felt ice cold.
"What do you mean?" she demanded, her voice unsteady.
He laughed bitterly. In his own heart a fierce volcanic surge was raging which he did not attempt to control.
"Do you think that I, trained as I am to gather fact from touch, could carry you through weeks of hell in my arms, against my breast, and not know you, you as you are, Claire Barkley? I shall carve you, you with your cold reserve suppressing the emotional chaos within you, and you will not fail to recognize yourself."
Claire gripped the chair arms. Anger, fear, doubt, then the knowledge that he could do as he said, swept over her in rapidly succeeding waves, and gathered at last into a steel hate that she felt must last through eternity.