"Don't, Red," she said, all the bars of her pretense down and dodging
from his eyes rather than from any move he made toward her. "Don't, Red.
Don't!" And began to whimper in the unbeautifulness of fear, becoming
strangely smaller as her pallor mounted.
He was as terrible and as swarthy and as melodramatic as Othello.
"Don't, Red," she called still again, and it was as if her voice came to
him from across a bog.
He was standing with one knee dug into the couch, straining her head
back against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautiful
flexing arch of her neck rising ... swanlike.
"Watch out!" There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung.
Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it. "Watch out,
Red! No-o--no--"
Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair swept
off her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as if
through the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marks
from glass, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned the
enormous silence of his rage.
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