“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“Is it the woman business again? For God’s sake, are you never going to grow up, McGuire? Are you going to remain an overgrown schoolboy all your life? Are you going to keep on eating your heart out over a bitch who thinks that spring is here every time her hind end itches? Are you going to throw your life away, and let your work go to smash because some damned woman in the change of life has done you dirt? What kind of man are you, anyway?” she jeered. “Jesus God! If it’s a woman that you want the woods are full of’em. Besides,” she added, “what’s wrong with your own wife! She’s worth a million of those flossy sluts.”
He made no answer and in a moment she went on in a harsh and jeering tone that was almost deliberately coarse:
“Haven’t you learned yet, with all you’ve seen of it, that a piece of tail is just a piece of tail, and that in the dark it doesn’t matter one good God-damn whether it’s brown, black, white, or yellow?”
Even as she spoke, something cold and surgical in his mind, which no amount of alcohol seemed to dull or blur, was saying accurately: “Why do they all feel such contempt for one another? What is it in them that makes them despise themselves?”
Aloud, however, waving his thick fingers at her in a gesture of fat disgust, he said:
“Creasman, you got a dirty tongue…. Don’t like to hear a woman talk like that…. Never liked to hear a dirty-talkin’woman…. You’re no lady!”
“Ah-h! No lady!” she said bitterly, and let her hands fall in a gesture of defeat. “All right, you poor fool, if that’s the way you feel about it, go ahead and drink yourself to death over your’lady.’That’s what’s wrong with you.”
And, muttering angrily, she left him. He sat there stupidly, without moving, until her firm heel-taps had receded down the silent hall, and he heard a door close. Then he reached down between his knees and got the jug and drank again. And again there was nothing in the place except the sound of silence, the rapid ticking of a little clock, the thick short breathing of the man.
XXV
Somewhere, far away, across the cool sweet silence of the night, Helen heard the sound of a train. For a moment she could hear the faint and ghostly tolling of its
