Page:Possession (1926).pdf/107

 who sat opposite him; but he did not understand the reason—that it lay in the very positiveness of his opponent, in the fact that the world of Harvey Seton consisted entirely of blacks and whites. There were in between no soft, warm shades of gray. May was (despite that fatal giggle) innocent as a flower, just as Lily Shane was the apotheosis of sin; and they were so because he willed them to be so. Thus he had created them, knowing his own daughter perhaps no better than he knew Lily Shane.

Clarence looked at him and blushed slowly. The walls began once more to close about him; he was frozen into silence.

"It was about May," Seton repeated slowly. . . . "She's unhappy. . . . At least her mother says she is, and it's on account of you."

In response to this Clarence found nothing to say. He would have protested but there were no words with which to frame a protest. The corset manufacturer bore down upon his victim like a Juggernaut. Clarence could neither speak, nor scream, nor rise from its path.

"I've guessed for a long time that there was something between you two." And here he permitted himself to smirk suddenly with a frigid sentimentality. "I'm not sorry, you understand. . . . Nothing could please me more. I'll need some one to help me in the factory . . . until Jimmy's old enough to take hold."

In his chair before the chilly, dying fire Clarence sat motionless; betraying no sign of the tortured soul that writhed within him.

"But I don't . . ." he began. "I mean . . ."

The Juggernaut rolled on. "I understand your bashfulness," continued his host. "I once had the honor of speaking myself . . . to the fine woman who is now my wife. My boy, there is nothing like a wife. It's the finest step a man can take . . . to settle himself into honorable matrimony." Here he bit a piece from the badly worn cigar and spat it into the ashes of the fire. "I am only speaking to you because I wanted to know if your in-