A flare of heat passed his throat and descended into his bosom.
“I want to live. I can do it—damn it—I can do it! I can forge ahead, make my mark.”
He forgot where he was for a moment and found new pleasure in this spoken admission, this new rebellion. He moved with the faint shaking of the earth, like a child on a woman’s lap.
The upraised hoofs of the first horse missed him, but the second did not.
And presently the horses drew apart, nibbling here and there, switching their tails, avoiding a patch of tall grass.
PERSONS: │ JAMES │CARSON _brothers_ HENRY │ 〃 JOHN │ 〃
KATE MORLEY—│_An adventuress, a lady of leisure_
PLACE—KATE MORLEY’S _boudoir. A long narrow room, with a great many lacquer screens in various shades of blue, a tastefully decorated room though rather extreme._
_At the rise of the curtain the three_ CARSON _brothers are discovered sitting together on a couch to the left. They look like peasants of the most obvious type. They are tall, rather heavy—and range in age from nineteen to twenty-five. They have sandy, sun-bleached hair that insists upon sticking straight up—oily, sweaty skins—large hanging lips and small eyes on which a faint whitish down moves for lashes. They are_ _clumsy and ill clothed. Russet shoes are on all six feet. They each wear a purple aster and each has on a tie of the super-stunning variety—they have evidently done their best to be as one might say “well dressed.”_
_When they speak—aside from their grunts—their voices are rough, nasal and occasionally crack. They are stoop-shouldered and their hands are excessively ugly._
_Yet in spite of all this, their eyes are intelligent, their smiles gentle, melancholy, compassionate. And though they have a look of formidable grossness and stupidity, there is, on second observation, a something beneath all this in no way in keeping with this first impression._
JOHN, _the youngest, and the smallest, looks around the room carefully_.
JOHN—A nice room, eh? [_He tries to whisper, but it comes forth buzzing and harsh._]
JOHN—Hush—I hear her coming! [_The curtains part and_ KATE MORLEY _enters. She is a woman of about forty. Handsome. Dark. She_ _is beautifully dressed—in a rather seductive fashion. She has a very interesting head; she has an air of one used to adulation and the pleasure of exerting her will. She has a trick of narrowing her eyes. As she comes forward there is a general commotion among the brothers, but none manages to stand up._]