"
This statement was astonishingly deliberate. He drew a moaning
breath after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, "You know,
Rita, that I cannot live without you. I haven't lived. I am not
living now. This isn't life. Come, Rita, you can't take a boy's
soul away and then let him grow up and go about the world, poor
devil, while you go amongst the rich from one pair of arms to
another, showing all your best tricks. But I will forgive you if
you only open the door," he ended in an inflated tone: "You
remember how you swore time after time to be my wife. You are more
fit to be Satan's wife but I don't mind. You shall be my wife!"
A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern:
"Don't laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses
there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move
a mountain.
Suddenly suspicion seized him out there. With perfectly farcical
unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: "Oh, you deceitful wretch! You
won't escape me! I will have you. . . ."
And in a manner of speaking he vanished. Of course I couldn't see
him but somehow that was the impression. I had hardly time to
receive it when crash! . . . he was already at the other door.
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