And his hands went up over them priestly.
CHAPTER XLI
He stumbled into the house in sudden need of Patty and her support in his panic.
He found her lying on the floor of the parlor, where she had fainted. Her big crinoline skirts belled out and she looked like a huge tulip fallen on its side. Her feet sat up awkwardly on their heels; her limbs were visible to the knees. It was the only ungraceful posture he had ever known her to assume.
As he gathered her into his arms, Patty returned from her coma into a kind of mania. She talked to herself or to some invisible listener. Mostly she muttered unintelligibly some gibberish that made her beautiful mouth ugly and unhuman.
She clung to her husband’s hands and arms, clutching at them when he moved them to lift her to a chair and bent above her, pleading with her to talk to him. She called him by his first name, babbling:
“David, David, oh, David! David, David!”
It was a long while before he could make out any other word and then he caught faintly:
“They shan’t stay here! They can go to Europe or California or hell. But they shan’t stay here! they shan’t, they shan’t!”
He could not persuade her to speak to them. When Immy came in radiant and shaken with laughter, Patty laughed like a woman long insane, worn down with some old ribald mania; but she would not speak, though Immy wept and begged: