Sometimes it
will do both. When he had her in his arms he felt no remorse for killing
the coarse, handsome brute who had ruined her. He savagely rejoiced in
it. But when she laid her head in the hollow of his shoulder, turning
to him her white face with the faint colour-staining on the parted lips,
the cheeks, the eyelids; when her dark, wide-apart, brown eyes gazed
up in the happiness of her abandonment--he felt only tenderness and
protection.
He left her at five o'clock, and had not gone two streets' length before
the memory of the little grey vagabond, screwed back in the far corner
of the dock like a baited raccoon, of his dreary, creaking voice, took
possession of him again; and a kind of savagery mounted in his brain
against a world where one could be so tortured without having meant harm
to anyone.
At the door of his lodgings Keith was getting out of a cab. They went in
together, but neither of them sat down; Keith standing with his back to
the carefully shut door, Laurence with his back to the table, as if they
knew there was a tug coming. And Keith said: "There's room on that boat.
Go down and book your berth before they shut. Here's the money!"
"I'm going to stick it, Keith.
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