and the wind comes through the holes
in the window panes. Sundays are the hardest days for me. Then Kate,
queen of the kitchen, is here, and she delights in cooking all sorts of
things on that day, so for the remaining six days our home smells of her
culinary operations--most abominable, this odour of stale cookery! And
what a mess our rooms are in on Monday morning! You wouldn't
comprehend, even if I told you. I have to clean up all this, and I wish
I could fly away every Sunday. At times I get so tired of this way of
living. I hope some day I may find a large barn with a hay loft: I would
immediately abolish Kate and her cookery and would be comfortable for
once in my life.

"So I ran away, for a time, partly for relief, partly because I was
rather taken with a Detroit anarchist who was visiting us. Though he was
a comrade, he was really a Philistine, which I did not see till
afterwards. I saw only that he was young and lusty and wanted a lark, as
I did, so I went with him on an awful tear, and returned terribly done
up, as you know.

"I have been lying here in this little room for three weeks. I thought
surely I should die, and I was neither glad nor sorry. It was curious,
this sensation of approaching death. All these days Terry sat opposite
me at a table reading or writing. I could see him distinctly at times,
at other times everything was misty or completely dark, only his voice
reached me from such a long, long distance. He sat there like an
implacable fate, with calm, cold eyes, gazing above and beyond me.
Between two slow heart beats I felt it was almost a duty to call him
and bid him farewell, but some strange sense of shyness held me back. I
tried so hard to think of what I might do, and the most grotesque and
comical things suggested themselves. At one lucid moment I had the
brilliant idea of becoming a jockey!

"Other ways of passing my life revolved ceaselessly in my brain, and now
at last perhaps I have found it. Now that I am better I am reading
Swinburne aloud, in bed. The sound of my voice carried along with the
music of his matchless rhythms is to me a delight and a wonder. I have
discovered that the Garden of Proserpine should be read only when one is
in a reclining position. Then one's voice conveys more perfectly the
weariness of all things mortal and the sweet delight of rest. I find I
must practice breathing more deeply, if I wish to render the voluptuous,
sinuous lines. Don't you think this