She breathed very fast. She was headclear now, as if in a storm which had passed all fibre, all flesh had been stripped from her taut nerves. She was a framework of nerves.
“Thank you,” she said again. “One less scream. Do you know what that means? One less scream!”
He came to her and clasped her arm.
“Scream again.”
She looked at him full. “Wait,” she panted. He held her. She leaned back feeling his hands strained by her weight to eat into her arms.
“Wait!” There was a liquid fullness in her voice. “Perhaps I can laugh instead. Laugh—“
“No. Don’t laugh, I tell you. Don’t lie, for God’s sake. Scream.”
There was a silence. The silence was all fresh and new like a dawn.
Gently she pressed from him. She sat by the table at the room’s far side. She buried her face in her hands on the cluttered table. She wept....
She wept long. She stayed still motionless there, with her face buried among papers after she had wept. The world came back:—The dusk of the spent day. The long cool wake of the spent heat-storm. The little office, pitching no longer ... spent ... atop the cluttered City. And this man, stranger she had worked for now many months, who was solid and could help ... this man so good that he had made her scream.