ss, I supposed it fear, or madness. I watch her turn and stretch, walk her random way about the room—see her make all the careless unstudied gestures I have marked so covetously, so long. Is this desire? How queer that I, of all people, should not know! But I thought desire smaller, neater; I supposed it bound to its own organs as taste is bound to the mouth, vision to the eye. This feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin.
I think she must see it. Now he has named it, I think it must colour or mark me—I think it must mark me crimson, like paint marks the hot red points, the lips and gashes and bare whipped limbs, of my uncle''s pictures. I am afraid, that night, to undress before her. I am afraid to lie at her side. I am afraid to sleep. I am afraid I will dream of her. I am afraid that, in dreaming, I will turn and touch her ...
But after all, if she senses the change in me, she thinks I am changed because of Richard. If she feels me tremble, if she feels my heart beat hard, she thinks I tremble for him. She is waiting, still waiting. Next day I take her walking to my mother''s grave. I sit and gaze at the stone, that I have kept so neat and free from blemish. I should like to smash it with a hammer. I wish—as I have wished many times—that my mother were alive, so that I might kill her again. I say to Sue: ''Do you know, how it was she died? It was my birth that did it!''—and it is an effort, to keep the note of triumph from my voice.