He thrust his arms into his overcoat and caught up his satchel. "I haven't wanted anything so hard to give! Good Lord! All I asked for was a well-kept house where I could invite my friends without being ashamed of it, and to live like other decent people!" He moved to the door, and put one hand, one strong, thin hand, on the knob. With the unearthly clearness of one in a terrible accident, Lydia noticed every detail of his appearance. He was flushed, a purple, congested color, singularly unlike his usual indoor pallor; hurried pulses throbbed visibly, almost audibly, at his temples; one eyelid twitched rapidly and steadily, like a clock ticking. With a gesture as automatic as drawing breath, he jerked out his watch and looked at it, apparently to make sure of catching his trolley, although his valedictory was poured out with such a passionate unpremeditation that the action must have been involuntary and unconscious. "But I don't even ask that now--since it doesn't suit you to bother to give it! All I ask now ought to be easy enough for any woman to do--not to _bother_ me! Leave me alone! Keep your everlasting stewing and fussing and hysterical putting-on to yourself! I don't bother you with my affairs--I haven't, and I never will--why, for God's sake, can't you-- Some men marry women who help them, and pull with them loyally, instead of pulling the other way all the time! Such a woman would have made me a thousand times more successful than I--" Lydia broke in with a loud voice of anguished questioning: "Do they make them better men?" she asked piercingly. Her husband looked at her over his shoulder. "Oh, you and your goody-goody cant!" he said, and going out without further speech, closed the door behind him. The clock struck the half-hour. Their conversation had lasted less than five minutes. CHAPTER XXX TRIBUTE TO THE MINOTAUR The scene of Paul's departure was no worse than many an outbreak in the ordinary married life of ordinary, quick-tempered, over-tired married people, for whom an open quarrel brings relief like the clearing of the air after an electric storm, but to Lydia it was no such surface manifestation of nerves. The impulse that had made them both break out into the cruel words came from some long-gathering bitterness, the very existence of which was like the end of all things to her. A single flash of lightning had showed her to the edge of what a terrifying precipice they had strayed, and then had left her in darkness. That was how it seemed to her; she was in the most impenetrable blackness, though the little girl played on beside her with a child's cheerful blindness to its elder's emotion, and Anastasia detected nothing but that her mistress had a better color than before and stepped about quite briskly.