I had to exercise a sudden self-control, as one puts on a brake, to prevent myself jumping up to stride about, shout, gesticulate, make her a scene.  What for?  What about?  I had no idea.  It was just the relief of violence that I wanted; and I lolled back in my chair, trying to keep my lips formed in a smile; that half-indulgent, half-mocking smile which was my shield against the shafts of her contempt and the insulting sallies flung at me by the old woman.

She drank the water at a draught, with the avidity of raging thirst, and let herself fall on the nearest chair, as if utterly overcome.  Her attitude, like certain tones of her voice, had in it something masculine:  the knees apart in the ample wrapper, the clasped hands hanging between them, her body leaning forward, with drooping head.  I stared at the heavy black coil of twisted hair.  It was enormous, crowning the bowed head with a crushing and disdained glory.  The escaped wisps hung straight down.  And suddenly I perceived that the girl was trembling from head to foot, as though that glass of iced water had chilled her to the bone.

“What’s the matter now?” I said, startled, but in no very sympathetic mood.

She shook her bowed, overweighted head and cried in a stifled voice but with a rising inflection: 

“Go away!  Go away!  Go away!”

I got up then and approached her, with a strange sort of anxiety.  I looked down at her round, strong neck, then stooped low enough to peep at her face.  And I began to tremble a little myself.

“What on earth are you gone wild about, Miss Don’t Care?”

She flung herself backwards violently, her head going over the back of the chair.  And now it was her smooth, full, palpitating throat that lay exposed to my bewildered stare.  Her eyes were nearly closed, with only a horrible white gleam under the lids as if she were dead.

“What has come to you?” I asked in awe.  “What are you terrifying yourself with?”

She pulled herself together, her eyes open frightfully wide now.  The tropical afternoon was lengthening the shadows on the hot, weary earth, the abode of obscure desires, of extravagant hopes, of unimaginable terrors.

“Never mind!  Don’t care!” Then, after a gasp, she spoke with such frightful rapidity that I could hardly make out the amazing words:  “For if you were to shut me up in an empty place as smooth all round as the palm of my hand, I could always strangle myself with my hair.”

For a moment, doubting my ears, I let this inconceivable declaration sink into me.  It is ever impossible to guess at the wild thoughts that pass through the heads of our fellow-creatures.  What monstrous imaginings of violence could have dwelt under the low forehead of that girl who had been taught to regard her father as “capable of anything” more in the light of a misfortune than that of a disgrace; as, evidently, something to be resented and feared rather than to be ashamed of?  She seemed, indeed, as unaware of shame as of anything else in the world; but in her ignorance, her resentment and fear took a childish and violent shape.