3

He threw his indoor shoes into the area. In the next street, beyond
pursuit, he sat down on a doorstep and, put on his boots, lacing them
with difficulty, for he was half blind with tears and anger. He could
not make up his mind how to kill Edith. Nothing seemed quite bad
enough. He thought of boiling her in oil or rolling her down hill in a
cask full of spikes, after the manner of some fairy story that
Christine had told him. It was not the pain, though his arm felt as
though it had been wrenched out of its socket, and the blood trickled
in a steady stream from his bumped forehead. It was the indignity, the
outrage, the physical humiliation that had to be paid back. It made
him tremble with fury and a kind of helpless terror to realize that,
because he was little, any common woman could shake and beat him and
treat him as though he belonged to her. He would tell his father.
Even his father, who had so far forgotten himself as to marry such a
creature, would see that there were things one couldn't endure. Or he
would call up the Banditti and plot a devastating retaliation.

In the meantime he was glad he had bitten her.

He walked on unsteadily. The earth still undulated and threatened
every now and then to rise up like a wave in front of him and cast him
down. He was growing cold and stiff, too, in the reaction. He had
stopped crying, but his teeth chattered and his sobs had degenerated
into monotonous, soul-shattering hiccoughs. Passers-by looked at him
disapprovingly. Evidently that nasty little boy from No. 10 had been