not go to the pump."

"You refuse to prepare the bath?"

"I will not go to the pump."

"You refuse to prepare the tea?"

"I will not be a cook."

"You are rankly rebellious?"

"I will not sleep in the attic."

"What!"

"I will not eat the food."

"What!"

"I will not do the work."

"What!"

"I will go."

"Go?"

"_Go_," repeated Annalise, stamping her foot. "I demand my wages, the
increased wages that were promised me, and I will go."

"And where, Impudence past believing, will you go, in a country whose
tongue you most luckily do not understand?"

Annalise looked up into Fritzing's furious eyes with the challenge
of him who flings down his trump card. "Go?" she cried, with a
defiance that was blood-curdling in one so small and hitherto so
silent, "I will first go to that young gentleman who speaks my
language and I will tell him all, and then, with his assistance, I
will go straight--but _straight_, do you hear?"--and she stamped
her foot again--"to Lothen-Kunitz."

XIV

Early in this story I pointed out what to the intelligent must have
been from the beginning apparent, that Annalise held Priscilla and
Fritzing in the hollow of her hand. In the first excitement of the
start she had not noticed it, but during those woeful days of
disillusionment at Baker's she saw it with an ever-growing clearness;
and since Sunday, since the day she found a smiling young gentleman
ready to talk German to her and answer questions, she was perfectly
aware that she had only to close her hand and her victims would
squeeze into any shape she liked. She proposed to do this closing at
the first moment of sheer intolerableness, and that moment seemed well
reached when she entered Creeper Cottage and realized what the attic,
the kitchen, and the pump really meant.

It is always a shock to find one's self in the company of a worm that
turns, always a shock and an amazement; a spectacle one never,
somehow, gets used to. But how dreadful does it become when one is in
the power of the worm, and the worm is resentful, and ready to squeeze
to any extent. Fritzing reflected bitterly that Annalise might quite
well have been left at home. Quite well? A thousand times better.
What had she done but whine during her passive period? And now that
she was active, a volcano in full activity hurling forth hot streams
of treachery on two most harmless heads, she, the insignificant, the
base-born, the empty-brained, was actual