CHAPTER XVIII
There was no egress for Lilly's state of panic. It hurled itself into
this and that _cul-de-sac_, only to dash into a black, a colossal wall
of ignorance builded on the sands of false and revolting modesty, and
which, as it tottered, threatened to crush her.
Her mind ran hither and thither, panic and anger plunging into storm
waves of sobs. Around and around spun her terror in its trap. Each pore
of her body might have been a mouth screaming. Distaste for her physical
awareness mounted upon her old peculiar aversion. The maternal did not
even lift its head. She could have beaten her own head, and did, for the
relief of pain. One alternative after another flickered into her
consciousness, only to die out again into blackness. Home! But by the
merest flash of the incongruous, not to say absurd, vision of Albert
Penny's wilted collar on the chiffonier, or his shirt sleeves that were
held back with pink rubber garters, bending over the recalcitrant bed
caster, knew how impossible that!
Forceps sensitive enough to lay hold of an antenna could not capture the
vagariousness of all of this, but none the less it was just that
ridiculous and irrelevant flash across her vision that eliminated the
almost unbearable tugging of nostalgia at her heart strings.
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