One of those smart dark-blue
twills like Mrs. Gronauer Junior's. Top-coat--sable. Louis' hair
thinning. Tonic. Oh God, let me sleep. Please, God. The wheeze rising in
her closed throat. That little threatening desire that must not shape
itself! It darted with the hither and thither of a bee bumbling against
a garden wall. No. No. Ugh! The vast chills of nervousness. The flaming,
the craving chills of desire!
Just this last giving-in. This once. To be rested and fresh for him
tomorrow. Then never again. The little beaded handbag. Oh God, help me.
That burning ache to rest and to uncurl of nervousness. All the
thousand, thousand little pores of her body, screaming each one, to be
placated. They hurt the entire surface of her. That great storm at sea
in her head; the crackle of lightning down that arm--
Let me see--Circassian walnut--baby-grand--the pores demanding,
crying--shrieking--
It was then that Carrie Samstag, even in her lovely pink night-dress, a
crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by
infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed,
unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with the cunning born of
travail.
It was actually a matter of fifteen minutes, that breathless swing
toward the floor, the mattress rising after her with scarcely a whisper
of its stuffings and her two bare feet landing patly into the pale blue
room-slippers, there beside the bed.
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