the craving chills of desire!

Just this last giving-in. This one. To be rested and fresh for him
to-morrow. Then never again. The little beaded hand bag. O God! help me!
That burning ache to rest and to uncurl of nervousness. All the thousand
thousand little pores of her body, screaming each one to be placated.
They hurt the entire surface of her. That great storm at sea in her
head; the crackle of lightning down that arm--

"Let me see--Circassian walnut--baby grand--" The pores demanding,
crying--shrieking--

It was then that Carrie Samstag, even in her lovely pink nightdress a
crone with pain, and the cables out dreadfully in her neck, began by
infinitesimal processes to swing herself gently to the side of the bed,
unrelaxed inch by unrelaxed inch, softly and with the cunning born of
travail.

It was actually a matter of fifteen minutes, that breathless swing
toward the floor, the mattress rising after her with scarcely a whisper
and her two bare feet landing patly into the pale-blue room slippers,
there beside the bed.

Then her bag, the beaded one on the end of the divan. The slow, taut
feeling for it and the floor that creaked twice, starting the sweat out
over her.

It was finally after more tortuous saving of floor creaks and the
interminable opening and closing of a door that Carrie Samstag, the
beaded bag in her hand, found herself face to face with herself in the