She glanced at me with an indescribable uneasiness. Then she leaned back in her chair with an effort, and pressed her lips together.
“No,” she said.
As the man went out and shut the door, she looked at me again from under her eyelids; and finally her eyes travelled from me to a small, thin-bladed knife, used for cutting oranges, that lay near her plate, and fixed themselves on it. She put out her hand stealthily, drew it towards her, and kept her hand over it on the table. I took an orange from a dish in front of me.
“Margot,” I said, “will you pass me that fruit-knife?”
She obviously hesitated.
“Give me that knife,” I repeated roughly, stretching out my hand.
She lifted her hand, left the knife upon the table, and at the same time, springing up, glided softly out of the room and closed the door behind her.
That evening I spent alone in the smoking-room, and, for the first time, she did not come to bid me good-night.
I sat smoking my cigar in a tumult of furious despair and love. The situation was becoming intolerable. It could not be en-dured. I longed for a crisis, even for a violent one. I could have cried aloud that night for a veritable tragedy. There were moments when I would almost have killed the child who mysteriously eluded and defied me. I could have wreaked a cruel vengeance upon the body for the sin of the mind. I was terribly, mortally distressed.
After a long and painful self-communion, I resolved to make another wild effort to set things right before it was too late; and when the clock chimed the half-hour after ten I went upstairs softly to her bedroom and turned the handle of the door, meaning to enter, to catch Margot in my arms, tell her how deep my love for her was, how she injured me by her base fears, and how she was driving me back from the gentleness she had given me to the cruelty, to the brutality, of my first nature.