Next day I was ill again. I had I suppose done too much the day before.
I was in bed alone all day. My old woman had suddenly returned without a
word of explanation or excuse. She had not, I am sure, even got so far
as the Moscow Province. I doubt whether she had even left Petrograd. I
asked her no questions. I could tell of course that she had been
drinking. She was a funny old creature, wrinkled and yellow and hideous,
very little different in any way from a native in the wilds of Central
Africa. The savage in her liked gay colours and trinkets, and she would
stick flowers in her hair and wear a tinkling necklace of bright red and
blue beads. She had a mangy dog, hairless in places and rheumy at the
eyes, who was all her passion, and this creature she would adore, taking
it to sleep with her, talking to it by the hour together, pulling its
tail and twisting its neck so that it growled with rage--and then, when
it growled, she, too, would make strange noises as though sympathising
with it.
She returned to me from no sort of sense of duty, but simply because, I
think, she did not know where else to go.
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