or is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating
enough, but the pattern is torturing.

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in
following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you
in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad
dream.

The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus.
If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of
toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions--why, that is
something like it.

That is, sometimes!

There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems
to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

When the sun shoots in through the east window--I always watch for that
first long, straight ray--it changes so quickly that I never can quite
believe it.

That is why I watch it always.

By moonlight--the moon shines in all night when there is a moon--I
wouldn't know it was the same paper.

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and
worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean,
and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.

I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind,
that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.

By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps
her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.

I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep
all I can.

Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each
meal.

It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep.

And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake--O no!

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.

It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,--that
perhaps it is the paper!

I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into
the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught him
several times LOOKING AT THE PAPER! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with
her hand on it once.

She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a
very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she
was doing with the paper--she turned around as if she had been caught
stealing, a