In the first excitement of the
start she had not noticed it, but during those woeful days of
disillusionment at Baker's she saw it with an ever-growing clearness;
and since Sunday, since the day she found a smiling young gentleman
ready to talk German to her and answer questions, she was perfectly
aware that she had only to close her hand and her victims would
squeeze into any shape she liked. She proposed to do this closing at
the first moment of sheer intolerableness, and that moment seemed well
reached when she entered Creeper Cottage and realized what the attic,
the kitchen, and the pump really meant.
It is always a shock to find one's self in the company of a worm that
turns, always a shock and an amazement; a spectacle one never,
somehow, gets used to. But how dreadful does it become when one is in
the power of the worm, and the worm is resentful, and ready to squeeze
to any extent. Fritzing reflected bitterly that Annalise might quite
well have been left at home. Quite well? A thousand times better.
What had she done but whine during her passive period? And now that
she was active, a volcano in full activity hurling forth hot streams
of treachery on two most harmless heads, she, the insignificant, the
base-born, the empty-brained, was actually going to be able to ruin
the plans of the noblest woman on earth.
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