"
"You will stay exactly where you are until I get done." Her tone was
perceptibly shriller. "And don't you dare call me pathetic; if you only
knew--disgracing yourself in New York, with a family at home. It is too
common and low and vulgar for words: like a travelling salesman. But
I'll make you behave if I have to lock you up."
Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose,
no longer flushed, but white with wrath. "I won't have it!" Her voice
was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the
table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp,
there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury,
a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare.
This, he realized, was worse than he had anticipated; he saw no safe
issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a wish
to protect Fanny, from herself as much as anything; but he was
powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without
interest, his patience was rapidly vanishing. He was conscious of Fanny
not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a
woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn.
His principal recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't
even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived
together in an entire intimacy.
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