She covered her face with both hands.
He left the room.
He himself was trembling as he reached the street--trembling for the
first time in years. As a child he had been given to these fits of
emotional tremors, but he had long since lost the faculty for recording
physically his intense moments. Or had he lost the faculty for the
intense moments themselves, he found himself wondering, as he walked
rapidly toward his home. The evening was warm with the perfume of a bit
of truant summer that had somehow escaped before its time to hearten a
winter-weary world against the bitter assaults of March. Birds of
passage sang among the hedges, the sun still cast a faint greenish glow
in the extreme west.
His first thought was of the cowering woman he had just left. He had
meant to lash her keenly with his verbal whipcords, but he had not
expected to find her quite so sensitive to his cutting scorn. He
remembered the gesture with which she had lifted her hand as if to
screen herself from his insults. There was a whole life of futile
compromise in just the manner of that gesture, a growing helplessness to
give straightforward thrusts, a pitiful admission of defeat. But he knew
that this surrender was temporary--a quick lifting of the mask under a
relentless pressure. To-morrow, in an hour, in ten minutes, Lily Condor
would be her dangerous self again, lashed into the fury of a woman
scorned.
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