He said: “We’ll finish it tonight.” He handed her a drink. She had fallen back in the chair. Even when he stood over her with the glass she did not look up from what seemed a pose of drooped eyelids. He had thought her shamming--that is, he acknowledged, if he actually thought about it. “Take a drink,” he said stridently. “We’ll drink over this thing. I used to discourage your drinking. This shows! Take a drink!” Her teeth, he remembered now, chattered as she said she did not want the drink. “What’s the matter?” he asked, with pleasure in his brutality. “Are you afraid of me?” She said: “It’s just that I’m so cold.” “Take the drink; drinks warm one.” He had forgotten the open window. He looked at her curiously. What was it she feared he would do to her? She stared at him, fascinated as a bird in front of a snake. He lifted his glass and glared at her over its rim. “Here’s to the cleaning of the stables!” She cried eagerly: “Oh, Nick--you do understand? That’s the way I feel about it.” He told me that, for the second time in the course of the night, he roared: “God--Eva!” She sighed: “You’re hard. You’re like a rock, and I dash my life out at your feet.” He growled: “Don’t be literary. I’m fed up with that tripe.” He sat slumped in his chair. “I hope to God,” he said impressively, “that I’ll never again run afoul of a literary person!” He lifted heavy eyes to me. “You see? I was hard as a rock, as she said. But I beg you to bear in mind that I believed Mapes to be responsible. I said to her: ‘You need a heavy-fisted beast. You’d eat the artist who got you--eat him raw. You need to be knocked down. I wonder if Mapes knows how to knock anyone down?’ Oh--I sneered! She was breathing in an odd way--shallow, you know. But I was tremendously wrought up; I didn’t think, at the time, that this might not be fear of my anger. And she shrugged, and said ‘What’s the use?’ I kept pounding on her. I said: ‘I suspect you’ll say next that with your genius--the claims of your genius, the right of your genius to devour every other right in the world----’ And she said--she was all but supplicating, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live: that she supplicated me and I turned a deaf ear----” There is a ghastly feature of tragedy: at one point or another the listener laughs out loud--laughs with frenzy, with tears streaming down the face, choking, gasping, beyond control in this confusion of the physical with the emotional. I laughed because Eva would have been disgusted with him for his phraseology. He turned very pale. “What can you see to laugh at?” I said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I went on hurriedly: “You would never understand why I laughed.”