He was sweating in his struggle with her, and most of all her strength
appalled him, she was so little for her terrible unaccountable power.
"Don't touch me! You can't! You haven't any arms! Horrible gills!"
She was talking as she struggled, still under the hoarse and frantic
whisper, but her breath coming in long soughs. "Slit-you-up-from-tail.
Slit--you--up--from--tail--to--gills."
"Annie! Annie!" still obsessed by his anguished desire to reassure
her with the normality of his touch. "See, Annie, it's daddy. Ann
Elizabeth's daddy." With a flash her arm and the glint of the paper
cutter eluded him again and again, but finally he caught her by the
waist, struggling, in his dreadful mistake, to calm her down into the
chair again.
"Now I've got you, darling. Now--sit--down--"
"No, you haven't," she said, a sort of wild joy coming out in her
whisper, and cunningly twisting the upper half of her body back from
his, the hand still held high. "You'll never get me--you fish!"
And plunged with her high hand in a straight line down into her throat.
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