snarl as he
fell on her. He caught her body in his great arms and shook it. He
moved without any sense of movement, without any memory of it.

"Where 's Binhart?" he repeated, foolishly, for by this time his great
hand had closed on her throat and all power of speech was beyond her.
He swung her about and bore her back across the table. She did not
struggle. She lay there so passive in his clutch that a dull pride
came to him at the thought of his own strength. This belated sense of
power seemed to intoxicate him. He was swept by a blind passion to
crush, to obliterate. It seemed as though the rare and final moment
for the righting of vast wrongs, for the ending of great injustices,
were at hand. His one surprise was that she did not resist him, that
she did not struggle.

From side to side he twisted and flailed her body about, in his
madness, gloating over her final subserviency to his will, marveling
how well adapted for attack was this soft and slender column of the
neck, on which his throttling fingers had fastened themselves.
Instinctively they had sought out and closed on that slender column,
guided to it by some ancestral propulsion, by some heritage of the
brute. It was made to get a grip on, a neck like that! And he grunted
aloud, with wheezing and voluptuous grunts of gratification, as he saw
the white face alter and the wide eyes darken with terror. He was
making her suffer. He was no longer enveloped by that mild and
tragically inquiring stare that had so discomforted him. He was no
longer stung by the thought that she was good to look on, even with her
head pinned down against a beer-stained card-table. He was converting
her into something useless and broken, into something that could no
longer come between him and his ends. He was completely and finally
humiliating her. He was breaking her. He was converting her into
something corrupt. . . . Then his pendulous throat choked with a
falsetto gasp of wonder. _He was killing her_!

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the smoke of that mental explosion
seemed to clear away. Even as he gaped into the white face so close to
his own he awoke to reason. The consciousness of how futile, of how
odious, of how maniacal, it all was swept over him. He had fallen low,
but he had never dreamed that he could fall so low as this.

A reaction of physical nausea left him weak and dizzy. The flexor
muscles of his fingers relaxed. An ague of weakness