Everything was conspiring to thrust him back
into the city, of which he had confessed his fear, back----
He rose and stood above the child's thin exposed body--suddenly frozen
into a deathlike sleep--chilled with a vision, a premonition, the
insidious possibility of surrender. He saw, too, that it was a solitary
struggle; even his devotion to Flavilla, shut in the single space of
his own heart, helped to isolate him in what resembled a surrounding
blackness rent with blinding flashes of lightning.
The morning sun showed him spare, with a curious appearance of being
both wasted and grimly strong; he moved with an alert, a watchful ease,
catlike and silent; and his face was pallid with gray shadows. He stood
in trousers and undershirt, suspenders hanging down, before the small
dim mirror in the room where he had the barber chair, pasting his hair
down with an odorous brilliantine. This was his intention, but he saw
with sharp discomfort that bristling strands defied his every effort.
The hot edge of anger cut at him, but, singing, he dissipated it:
"_Why should I feel discouraged?
Why should the shadows fall?
Why should my heart be lonely,
And long for heaven_----"
He broke off at the thought of Flavilla, still in bed, her head, if
anything, hotter than last night. Lemuel Doret wished again that he had
not allowed Bella to call their child by that unsanctified name. Before
the birth they had seen a vaudeville, and Bella, fascinated by a
golden-and-white creature playing a white accordion that bore her name
in ornamental letters, had insisted on calling her daughter, too,
Flavilla.
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