Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose, no longer flushed, but white with wrath. “I won't have it!” Her voice was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp, there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury, a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare. This, he realized, was worse than he had anticipated; he saw no safe issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a wish to protect Fanny, from herself as much as anything; but he was powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without interest, his patience was rapidly vanishing. He was conscious of Fanny not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn. His principal recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived together in an entire intimacy. Dissolved by his indifference, the past vanished like a white powder in a glass of water. She might have been a woman overtaken by a mental paroxysm in the cold impersonality of a railway station. “Stop it,” he commanded sharply; “you are hysterical, all kinds of a fool.” “Only one kind,” she corrected him, in a voice so rasped that it might have come from a rusted throat; “and I'm not going to be it much longer. You have cured me, you and that Savina. But what--what makes me laugh is how you thought you could explain and lie and bully me. Anything would do to tell me, I'd swallow it like one of those big grapes.” She was speaking in gusts, between the labored heavings of her breast; her eyes were staring and dark; and her hands opened and shut, shut and opened, continuously. Fanny's cheeks were now mottled, there were fluctuating spots of red, blue shadows, on the pallor of her skin. “In a minute more you'll be sick,” he warned her. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “that's all he knows, all he feels! In a minute, a minute, I'll be sick. Don't you see, you damned fool,” her voice rose until it seemed impossible that she could hold the pitch, “can't you understand I am dying?” “No.” His terseness was calculated: that, he thought, would best control her wildness. “No one could be more alive. If I were you, though, I'd go up to bed; we've had enough of this, or I have; I can't speak for you. But, however that may be, and as I've said before, it has got to stop, now, at once.”