With tottering step and feeble, shaking limbs, Edward Taine entered the
apartment. As he stood, silently looking at his young wife, his glazed,
red-rimmed eyes fed upon her voluptuous beauty with a look of sullen,
impotent lustfulness that was near insanity. A spasm of coughing seized
him; he gasped and choked, his wasted body shaken and racked, his
dissipated face hideously distorted by the violence of the paroxysm.
Wrecked by the flesh he had lived to gratify, he was now the mocked and
tortured slave of the very devils of unholy passion that he had so often
invoked to serve him. Repulsive as he was, he was an object to awaken the
deepest pity.
Mrs. Taine, looking up from her novel, watched him curiously--without
moving or changing her attitude of luxurious repose--without speaking.
Almost, one would have said, a shade of a smile was upon her too perfect
features.
When the man--who had dropped weak and exhausted into a chair--could
speak, he glared at her in a pitiful rage, and, in his throaty whisper,
said with a curse, "You seem to be amused."
Still, she did not speak. A tantalizing smile broke over her face, and she
stretched her beautiful body lazily in her chair, as a well-conditioned
animal stirs in sleek, physical contentment.
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