across her face. Then, in a moment, she went down to her pots again.
Frantically, angrily, with twitching limbs they demanded calm and steady nerves from one another; they insisted that they keep away from the sick-room—but, as if drawn by some terrible magnet, they found themselves again and again outside the door, listening, on tiptoe, with caught breath, with an insatiate thirst for horror, to the hoarse noise of his gasping as he strove to force air down into his strangled and cemented lungs. And eagerly, jealously, they sought entrance to the room, waiting their turn for carrying water, towels, supplies.
Mrs. Pert, from her refuge in the boarding-house across the street, called Helen on the phone each half-hour, and the girl talked to her while Eliza came from the kitchen into the hall, and stood, hands folded, lips pursed, with eyes that sparkled with her hate.
The girl cried and laughed as she talked.
“Well… that’s all right, Fatty…. You know how I feel about it…. I’ve always said that if he had one true friend in the world, it’s you… and don’t think we’re ALL ungrateful for what you’ve done….”
During the pauses, Eugene could hear the voice of the other woman across the wires, sobbing.
And Eliza said, grimly: “If she calls up again you let me talk to her. I’ll fix her!”
“Good heavens, mama!” Helen cried angrily. “You’ve done enough already. You drove her out of the house when she’d done more for him than all his family put together.” Her big strained features worked convulsively. “Why, it’s ridiculous!”
Within Eugene, as he paced restlessly up and down the hall or prowled through the house a-search for some entrance he had never found, a bright and stricken thing kept twisting about like a trapped bird. This bright thing, the core of him, his Stranger, kept twisting its head about, unable to look at horror, until at length it gazed steadfastly, as if under a dreadful hypnosis, into the eyes of death and darkness. And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that he could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and ugliness, from the eclipsing
