“What else can you do?” I asked, as quietly and reasonably as I could manage. “At this moment you seem more like your real self, Crocker, than at any other time since I came in here—”
“I'm myself, all right,” he broke in gruffly. “Never you mind about that. Let me hear your arguments.”
“—and you can't sit here, and look me in the eye, and tell me that you seriously consider carrying out the insane purpose that brought you here. You can't, man!”
“Cut that talk out!” he cried angrily. “Stick to your own side of it.”
“There is no other side of it, Crocker. You're not going to kill her. She'll never go back to you. Your only possible course is to give her up. And my guess is that you'll show yourself a reasonably good sport.”
This touched him. At last I had hit on a phrase that he could understand, in all this ugly talk that I was driving so desperately at him.
“Never mind that, either,” he growled.
I stood up, and looked at him. It seemed to me that I had him. Certainly, he was avoiding my eyes.
He jerked out his watch, and stared at it, turning the stem around and around between his fingers.
“It's eleven-fifteen,” he said, then slowly let the watch drop back in his pocket.