Adna dropped his valises with a thud. He began to upbraid her. He had endured too much. He had still his bill to pay. He told her that she was a good-for-nothin' nuisance and he wished he had left her home. He'd never take her anywheres again, you bet. Kedzie lost her reason entirely. She was shattered with spasms of grief aggravated by her mother's ferocity and her father's. She could not give up this splendor. She would not go to a cheap place to live. She would never go back home. She would rather die. Her mother boxed her ears and shook her and scolded with all her vim. But Kedzie only shook out more sobs till they wondered what the people next door would think. Adna was wan with wrath. Kedzie was afraid of her father's look. She had a kind of lockjaw of grief such as children suffer and suffer for. All she would answer to her father's threats was: “I won't! I won't! I tell you I won't!” Her cheeks were blubbered, her nose red, her mouth swollen, her hair wet and stringy. She gulped and swallowed and beat her hands together and stamped her feet. Adna glared at her in hatred equal to her own for him. He said to his wife: “Ma, we got to go back to first principles with that girl. You got to give her a good beatin'.” Mrs. Thropp had the will but not the power. She was palsied with rage. “I can't,” she faltered. “Then I will!” said Adna, and he roared with ferocity, “Come here to me, you!” He put out his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated from him. She stopped sobbing. She had never been so frightened. She felt a new kind of fright, the fright of a nun at seeing an altar threatened with desecration. She had not been whipped for years. She had grown past that. Surely her body was sacred from such infamy now. “Come here to me, I tell you!” Adna snarled, as he pursued her slowly around the chairs. “You better not whip me, poppa,” Kedzie mumbled. “You better not touch me, I tell you. You'll be sorry if you do! You better not!” “Come here to me!” said Adna. “Momma, momma, don't let him!” Kedzie whispered as she ran to her mother and flung herself in her arms for refuge. Mrs. Thropp then lost a great opportunity forever. She tore the girl's hands away and handed her over to her father. And he, with ugly fury and ugly gesture, seized the young woman who had been his child and dragged her to him and sank into a chair and wrenched and twisted her arms till he held her prone across his knees. Then he spanked her with the flat of his hand. Kedzie made one little outcry; then there was no sound but the thump of the blows. Adna sickened soon of his task, and Kedzie's silence and non-resistance robbed him of excuse. He growled: “I guess that'll learn you who's boss round here.” He thrust her from his knees, and she rolled off to the floor and lay still. She had not really swooned, but her soul had felt the need of withdrawing into itself to ponder this awful sacrilege. CHAPTER VIII