so that you felt it was obnoxious
and wrapped in dirty underwear.

. . . . .

And now I looked at her again. The evening gently dispelled the
ugliness, wiped out the misery and the horror, changed the dust into
shadow, like a curse turned into a blessing. All that remained of her
was colour, a mist, an outline; not even that; a thrill and the beating
of her heart. Every trace of her had disappeared save her true self.

That was because she was alone. An extraordinary thing, a dash of the
divine in it, to be actually alone. She was in that perfect innocence,
that purity which is solitude.

I desecrated her solitude with my eyes, but she did not know it, and so
/she/ was not desecrated.

She went over to the window with brightening eyes and swinging hands in
her apron of the colour of the nocturnal sky. Her face and the upper
part of her body were illuminated. She seemed to be in heaven.

She sat down on the sofa, a great low red shadow in the depths of the
room near the window. She leaned her broom beside her. Her dust cloth
fell to the floor and was lost from sight.

She took a letter from her pocket and read it. In the twilight the
letter was the whitest thing in the world. The double sheet trembled
between her fingers, which held it carefully, like a dove in the air.
She put the trembling letter to her lips, and kissed it. From whom was
the letter? Not from her family. A servant girl is not likely to have
so much filial devotion as to kiss a letter from her parents. A lover,
her betrothed, yes. Many, perhaps, knew her lover's name. I did not,
but I witnessed her love as no other person had. And that simple
gesture of kissing the paper, that gesture buried in a room, stripped
bare by the dark, had something sublime and awesome in it.

She rose and went closer to the window, the white letter folded in her
grey hand.

The night thickened--and it seemed to me as if I no longer knew her age,
nor her name, nor the work she happened to be doing down here, nor
anything about her--nothing at all. She gazed at the pale immensity,
which touched her. Her eyes gleamed. You would say she was crying,
but no, her eyes only shed light. She would be an angel if reality
flourished upon the earth.

She sighed and walked to the door slowly. The door closed behind her
like something falling.

She had gone without doing anything but reading her letter and kissing
it.

. . . . .

I returned to my corn