He’ll watch them burn, and watch me. Darkness will come and the candle will burn out. And after that a silence will be inexcusable. He is just waiting. I’ll go up to my room, and something in him will drag after me. Later he’ll tell me that he loves me. They all do. As though it were a plan, the last thing it can ever be. No plan is necessary to lie flat on your back.” She sat on one side of the fire, and he on the other. A clock ticked over their silence, an elected one; they did not wish to talk. They were tired after the long walk. Miss Fetch had served them dinner, had attended upon them in the sulkiest fashion, and had then gone off again, perhaps to do penance for the sin that would shortly be committed. The man is inert, his body slumped, and his arms lie stretched along the hard, uncomfortable arms of the chair. Only his eyes are not tired, looking, staring, at the impossible, the unbelievable. A woman in a chair; a woman in a long blue, sheath-like dress, which by the very act of sitting pronounces upon what in this silent hour can only be stared at, the razor sharp line of a thigh, the upthrusting, taunting, and giving breast, the partly open mouth and the tiny teeth, the hair that seems to dart with light from the candle.
