a cigarette, and Eliza, working her lips, stood with an attentive ear cocked to the door of the sick-room. She was holding a useless kettle of hot water.
“Huh? Hah? What say?” asked Eliza, before any one had said anything. “How is he?” Her eyes darted about at them.
“Get away! Get away! Get away!” Eugene muttered savagely. His voice rose. “Can’t you get away?”
He was infuriated by the sailor’s loud nervous breathing, his large awkward feet. He was angered still more by Eliza’s useless kettle, her futile hovering, her “huh?” and “hah?”
“Can’t you see he’s fighting for his breath? Do you want to strangle him? It’s messy! Messy! Do you hear?” His voice rose again.
The ugliness and discomfort of the death choked him; and the swarming family, whispering outside the door, pottering uselessly around, feeding with its terrible hunger for death on Ben’s strangulation, made him mad with alternate fits of rage and pity.
Indecisively, after a moment, they went downstairs, still listening for sounds in the sick-room.
“Well, I tell you,” Eliza began hopefully. “I have a feeling, I don’t know what you’d call it—” She looked about awkwardly and found herself deserted. Then she went back to her boiling pots and pans.
Helen, with contorted face, drew him aside, and spoke to him in whispered hysteria, in the front hall.
“Did you see that sweater she’s wearing? Did you see it? It’s filthy!” Her voice sank to a brooding whisper. “Did you know that he can’t bear to look at her? She came into the room yesterday, and he grew perfectly sick. He turned his head away and said’O Helen, for God’s sake, take her out of here.’You hear that, don’t you. Do you hear? He can’t stand to have her come near him. He doesn’t want her in the room.”
“Stop! Stop! For God’s sake, stop!” Eugene said, clawing at his throat.
The girl was for the moment insane with hatred and hysteria.
“It may be a terrible thing to say, but if he dies I shall hate her. Do you think I can forget the way she’s acted? Do you?” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “She’s let him die here before her
