n who
takes care of him----"

When she had made herself clear, his face turned brick-red, and for an
instant his eyes were terrible. One would have said that some ancestor
uncontaminated by Zanzibar, some true Arab of Oman, stood there in his
place, flaming with outraged dignity. He cast back at her one more
burning look before he stalked from the house.

The following week, when she had forgotten him, she found him, at
twilight, in the black-and-white hall.

He looked exhausted, as if he had tramped innumerable miles; and his
face was as pale as death. He bowed humbly, muttering:

"Madam, if you will forgive, I am now ready to be the servant of that
sick man."

CHAPTER XXVII

Sometimes she tried to stand off as a spectator of her emotionalism, to
examine these new feelings. Were they more egotistical than
compassionate, more defiant than gentle? Among them, at any rate,
there was gratitude. She had found an object in life, had splendidly
emerged from her old sensations of incompleteness and inferiority. No
longer that morbid humility struggling in vain to transform itself into
a violent self-assertion. Not since she had become the virtual
creatrix of beauty, even the giver of life!

And David, because she owed so much to him, became every day more
precious. All this new dignity and worth that now enveloped her, these
self-satisfactions of a Euterpe and a Beatrice, depended on his
survival, would increase, even if he maintained just that strange
equilibrium between life and death, but would die the instant he died.
So for Lilla he took on such importance that everything else in life
turned insignificant: old ardors were all consumed in this new ardor at
once conquering and maternal, vainglorious and passionately grateful.

Even that wound in her heart from which a corporeal love had been torn
out by the roots, was healed at last, as it seemed, by these new forms
of pride and tenderness that could culminate in no material union.

She returned less and less often to the little house in Greenwich
Village, where Parr, escaped from his crutches, sat in a chintz-covered
chair, a cane between his knees, his white head lowered, still dreaming
of "those good days."

"You're better, aren't you? What does the doctor say now? Is there
anything you need here?"

Her eyes, avoiding his look of humble devotion, roamed over the walls,
as if she were considering the advisability of more Delia Robbia
plaque