At last she spoke in cool, even, colorless tones; "Perhaps you will
tell me what you want?"
The wretched victim of his own unbridled sensuality shook with
inarticulate rage. Choking and coughing he writhed in his chair--his
emaciated limbs twisted grotesquely; his sallow face bathed in
perspiration his claw-like hands opening and closing; his bloodless lips
curled back from his yellow teeth, in a horrid grin of impotent fury. And
all the while she lay watching him with that pitiless, mocking, smile. It
was as though the malevolent devil and the tortured soul had suddenly
changed places.
When the man could speak, he reviled her, in his rasping whisper, with
curses that it seemed must blister his tongue. She received his effort
with jeering laughter and taunting words; moving her body, now and then,
among the cushions, with an air of purely physical enjoyment that, to the
other, was maddening.
"If this is all you came for,"--she said, easily,--"might have spared
yourself the effort--don't you think?"
Controlling himself, in a measure, he returned, "I came to tell you that
your intimacy with that damned painter must stop."
Her eyes narrowed slightly. One hand, hidden in the cushions, clenched
until her rings hurt.
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