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As Curley's wife screams in panic, Lennie covers her mouth to silence her, fearing that George will be angry if she continues to make noise.

The triangulation is grotesque: Lennie's plea is addressed to her, but it invokes a third party ('George'll be mad') as the source of harm-avoidance, displacing his moral universe entirely outside the present scene. He cannot conceptualize the dying woman as the subject of his ethical obligation; she registers only as the proximate cause of George's future displeasure. The verb 'begged' is bitterly chosen—the killer pleading with the victim—and inverts the conventional grammar of mercy.

Support a thesis that Lennie's ethical world is entirely mediated through George, such that other human beings register only as instruments by which George might become angry—this passage exposes the moral cost of his absolute dependency.