"They're the handsomest couple in the room," said Vincent, at random to a farmer near him, who looked at him astonished by the heat of his accent. And then, seeing that Nelly's husband was in possible earshot, Vincent raised his voice recklessly. "They're the handsomest couple in the room," he repeated resentfully. "They ought always to dance together."
If 'Gene heard, he did not show it, the granite impassivity of his harsh face unmoved.
Vincent went on towards the door, his nerves a little relieved by this outburst. He would go out and have another cigarette, he thought, and then take his old man-child home to bed. What were they doing in this absurd place?
The music began to skirl again as he stepped out and closed the door behind him.
He drew in deeply the fresh night-air, and looking upward saw that the clouds had broken away and that the stars were out, innumerable, thick-sown, studding with gold the narrow roof of sky which, rising from the mountains on either side, arched itself over the valley. He stood staring before him, frowning, forgetting what he had come out to do. He told himself that coming from that yelling confusion inside, and the glare of those garish lamps, he was stupefied by the great silence of the night. There was nothing clear in his mind, only a turmoil of eddying sensations which he could not name. He walked down to the huge dark pine, the pine which 'Gene Powers loved like a person, and which his wife wished were cut down. What a ghastly prison marriage was, he thought, a thing as hostile to the free human spirit as an iron ball-and-chain.
He looked back at the little house, tiny as an insect before the great bulk of the mountains, dwarfed by the gigantic tree, ridiculous, despicable in the face of Nature, like the human life it sheltered. From its every window poured a flood of yellow light that was drunk up in a twinkling by the vastness of the night's obscurity.
He leaned against the straight, sternly unyielding bole of the tree, folding his arms and staring at the house. What a beastly joke the whole business of living!
A thousand ugly recollections poured their venom upon him from his past life. Life, this little moment of blind, sensual groping and grabbing for something worth while that did not exist, save in the stultification of the intelligence. All that you reached for, so frantically, it was only another handful of mud, when you held it.