a woman! These are clothes, and here's . . . your soft breast? And your face? and your hair? O you dear woman, why are you holding me so with your soft arms, and laying my face on your soft breast? Let's go to sleep like that—together. Will you? Come close to me, I will tell you something. Do you know, I've been longing for you to come to me . . . to come to me, ever since … But let's rest, now you are come, dear. I saw a woman with a sweet face to-night. She passed me on the pavement in the crowd: but not so sweet as yours. I love to . . . Closer, closer! Let me feel you, I am beginning to be afraid! Don't let these wasp-waisted waterspouts touch me!. . . How dark it grows.—The waterspouts! the waterspouts! Ashtaroth, the terrible woman! A star over her brow, driving in the midst, under the shadows.—They are on to me! over me! I am sinking!…—Up! up! Hold me up!. . . Catch me by the hair. . . . Rayne!. . . Rayne!'
iv
I awoke in the dusk.
Up leaped a core of light at the far end of the room; then grew steady and lived. Some one had lit the gas-lamp at the street-corner below. I turned over in my bed. I thought that it was lazy of me to be lying warm here: to-day, when I had, I remembered, intended seeking work. Work! Work for what? Well, it was lazy of me to be lying warm here. Where had I been?. . .
Some one came in softly (the door had opened). And why didn't they knock?
Turning round I saw a girl on her way to the table with a paper-bag in her hand.
'Hullo!' I said.
She dropped the bag on to the floor with a start: sharply picked it up, and, looking with round shadowed eyes at me:
'Good gracious, how you did frighten me!—Why, he's better!' she said.
'Certainly, he is,' I answered, turning aside my eyes. 'There was never anything the matter with him that he is aware of.'
