He woke in the night from a bad dream—with terror clinging thickly about his senses. But it did not slowly dissolve and release him, as nightmare is wont to do. It remained—so that he lay still as a man in his winding-sheet, afraid to move—remembering—
"I did kill my husband."
Yes—that was it. In the room with him was a strange woman who had killed her husband.
Not Ruth—but a strange woman. How had she got into the room with him?
She had killed her husband. And now, he was her husband.
He lay motionless, but his imagination began to crawl.... What might happen to a man shut up alone in a house with a woman who—murdered?
His imagination began to race—and he lost control of it. Murder ... with dry, sandy throat and a kicking heart, Dickie had to pay for his audacity in imagining he was big enough to claim life in the raw.
"Not big enough! Not big enough!"—the goblins of the underworld croaked at him in triumphant chorus.... They capered ... they snapped their fingers at him ... they spun him down to where fear was ... he had delivered himself to them, by not being big enough.
"Mrs. Bigger had a baby—which was bigger, Mrs. Bigger or the baby?"
The silly conundrum sprang at him from goodness knows what void—and over and over again he repeated it to himself, trying to remember the answer, trying to forget fear....