Lawyers -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
"What must you think of me?" she was moaning—"I don’t know what came
over me!—What must you think of me?"
He thought nothing. He could think nothing. He could realize only that
he was again to be robbed. Twice to-night the cheat that played with men
at the game of life had given him the winning hand, only to sweep the
stakes from the board just as Luke reached for what he had won. The
blood-lust changed its form; it assumed an ungovernable fury. Something
crackled in his brain as he had seen imperfect feed-wires at the touch
of a trolley-wheel. The crimson veil fluttered again before his eyes.
He turned and bolted the door. He turned again and ran to her. His
face was wet with sweat, black with powder, terrible.
She understood. She lowered her head and tried to dodge past him. She
cried out.
His strong fingers caught her hair. The hair streamed down. Her
forward lurch brought it taut. He jerked at it; she fell toward him.
His free hand caught her throat and stopped her fall. He tossed her
against the table; her feet brushed the floor, but he pressed her
shoulders tight to the table’s top. He bent over her, one hand at her
throat, the other raised to stop her mouth, his beating breath on her
face.
She was wholly in his power now. The outside world was impotent because
the outside world could not have heeded her appeal; the woman herself
was helpless because her captor’s was the strongest body. Again came to
Luke the frightful sense of Power, again the dizzy knowledge that he
could do whatever he chose.
At that instant the madness fell from him.
A physical motive there of course was, since the more intense the
passion the briefer is its duration; but even if it originated in the
physical, this reaction transcended things material and wheeled about to
crush them. It was the second and fuller phase of that revelation which
had come to him in the Sunday quiet of the Brooklyn streets. Burning,
blinding, transfiguring, the Marvel and the Miracle, elemental and
tremendous, returned, and what they had once done from the flesh to the
spirit, they now did from the spirit to the flesh. They returned to
remain. They completed the revolution, the new birth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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