So Persis, now, with that madly stitching shuttle in her breast, and that red seepage from her side, had unnumbered things to say. She chattered desperately, disjointedly:
"Oh, I suppose it had to come. It's what I get for trying to run things my own way. And now the tango-shop's closed up. But it's so funny that you should be the one to—and with a knife! You didn't mar my face, anyway. I thank you for that much. I'd hate to have my face hidden at the funeral. I should hate to make an ugly cor—"
Her lips refused the awful word as a thing unclean, abominable. Her body and all the voluptuous company of her senses felt panic-stricken at the thought of dissolution. She moaned and struggled with her chair.
"No, no, not that! What have I to do with death? I'm not ready to die. I'm not ready to die."
Willie got up and ran to her left side, but shrank back from what was there, and moved cautiously round on the slippery floor, crying: "You're too beautiful to die, too beautiful! You'll not die! The doctors will save you!"
"They must come very soon, then," Persis said, "for I'm bleeding—oh, so fast." She looked down along her side and complained: "See, my gown is quite ruined. And it was such a pretty gown. I'm afraid of my blood. How it gushes! Will it never stop? And it hurts! Willie, it hurts!"
In a long writhe of pain she gathered the table-cloth about her left side as if to stanch its flow. There was a rattle of falling glasses and a chink of tumbled silver as she moaned: "Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?" And she turned her head this way and that, panting as one pursued, bewildered, utterly at a loss. "Oh, what shall I do? I don't want to die. It's an awful thing to die—just now of all times, with no chance to make good the wrong I've done."
"You can't die; I won't let you die. You're too beautiful to die," Willie protested, and then turned to pleading: "I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to strike you, Persis, at all. It was just my hand. It wasn't me that stabbed you, Persis. I couldn't hurt you, Persis."
"Oh, that's all right, Willie. I understand. I understand things better now, with so few minutes more to live. It is you that must forgive me. I haven't been a good wife to you, Willie. And he—he, of all men!—said I wasn't worth fighting for! Faithless to you—faithless to him! But oh, God knows, most faithless to myself. And now I must die for it."
"You are too beautiful to die! I won't let you die! You can't die!"