. is it? You think so?..."

He was so incoherent with fury, that she could scarcely understand half
of what he said. The saliva churned at the corners of his mouth in the
frenzy of his sudden madness of jealous rage and suspicion. He'd show
her he saw through her noble unselfishness. She and her dago!

Sophy stared at him in horror. She thought that his brain had given way.

"Morris ... Morris...." she kept murmuring.

"O _God_...." he choked. "God ... God that you should take me for a
sucking fool--you and your dago ... you and your little Lombard
mucker.... You!--To _me_!... for _my_ sake!... 'Divorce'!... Set _me_
free!..."

He dropped across a table, hugging himself, shivering with stridulant,
choked laughter. He shook with it--was convulsed with it as with throes
of nausea. Long, steady drinking had its meet effect. He was hysterical
bedlamite--unmanned man--raging tiger of jealousy ... all these things
in one ... dreadful to see ... to hear....

Sophy stood gathered up and back from him. She looked dead--as though
she had died standing.

With Loring, the paroxysm passed. He clung to the table as to the
taffrail of a reeling ship. The whole world seemed waving like a flag.

Then suddenly, in a high, clear, toneless voice, Sophy said:

"I do not now offer to set you free.... I demand to be set free
myself...."

She went swiftly into the next room. He heard the key turn in the lock.
He went on clinging to the table which seemed to swing him to and fro.
He remembered hearing that rage kills sometimes. He thought for long
moments that he was dying.

For some days after he was, indeed, seriously ill.

XXXV

When Sophy had realised the full meaning of Loring's confused, frenzied
words, she had felt in addition to her unspeakable indignation and
disgust, a strange sensation as of something withering and falling away
from her. At the same time, in the depths of her, there was a quick
clench like the snap of a vise. And she knew that this gin had set upon
the past--upon her long forbearance; that inevitably, implacably her
whole being had revolted, had set itself in that vise-like lock against
all future temporising. It was over--done with. Her life with Morris
Loring was as past as though they had lived it in another age, on
another planet. She knew that she would be inflexible. Her mood might
soften, pity might rise murmuring. She, herself--her very self of
self--would never change--could not chang