Helen had lain awake for hours in darkness, in a strange comatose state of terror and hallucination. There was no sound save the sound of Barton’s breathing beside her, but in her strange drugged state she would imagine she heard all kinds of sounds. As she lay there in the dark, her eyes wide open, wide awake, plucking at her large cleft chin abstractedly, in a kind of drugged hypnosis, thinking like a child:
“What is that?… Someone is coming!… That was a car that stopped outside…. Now they’re coming up the steps…. There’s someone knocking at the door…. Oh, my God!… It’s about Papa!… He’s had another attack, they’ve come to get me… he’s dead!… Hugh! Hugh! Wake up!” she said hoarsely, and seized him by the arm. And he woke, his sparse hair tousled, grumbling sleepily.
“Hugh! Hugh!” she whispered. “It’s Papa—he’s dying… they’re at the door now!… oh, for heaven’s sake, get up!” she almost screamed in a state of frenzied despair and exasperation. “Aren’t you good for anything!… Don’t lie there like a dummy—Papa may be dying! Get up! Get up! There’s someone at the door! My God, you can at least go and find out what it is! Oh, get up, get up, I tell you!… Don’t leave everything to me! You’re a man—you can at least do that much!”—and by now her voice was almost sobbing with exasperation.
“Well, all right, all right!” he grumbled in a tone of protest, “I’m going! Only give me a moment to find my slippers and my bath-robe, won’t you?”
And, hair still twisted, tall, bony, thin to emaciation, he felt around with his bare feet until he found his slippers, stepped gingerly into them, and put on his bath-robe, tying the cord around his waist, and looking himself over in the mirror carefully, smoothing down his rumpled hair and making a shrugging motion of the shoulders. And she looked at him with a tortured and exasperated glare, saying:
“Oh, slow, slow, slow!… My God, you’re the slowest thing that ever lived!… I could walk from here to California in the time it takes you to get out of bed.”
“Well, I’m going, I’m going,” he said again with surly protest. “I don’t want to go to the front door naked—only give me a minute to get ready, won’t you?”
“Then, go, go, go!” she almost screamed at him. “They’ve been there for
