her face. She shakes her head to left and to right, violently, so as
to wipe her eyes and signify dissent at the same time.

"Never! A word like that you said to me breaks the heart forever. But
I must get up and get you something to eat. You must eat. I brought
you up when you were a little one,"--her voice capsizes--"I've given up
all for you, and you treat me as if I were an adventuress."

I hear the sound of her skinny feet as she plants them successively on
the floor, like two boxes. She is seeking her things, scattered over
the bed or slipped to the floor; she is swallowing sobs. Now she is
upright, shapeless in the shadow, but from time to time I see her
remarkable leanness outlined. She slips on a camisole and a jacket,--a
spectral vision of garments which unfold themselves about her
handle-like arms, and above the hollow framework of her shoulders.

She talks to herself while she dresses, and gradually all my
life-history, all my past comes forth from what the poor woman
says,--my only near relative on earth; as it were my mother and my
servant.

She strikes a match. The lamp emerges from the dark and zigzags about
the room like a portable fairy. My aunt is enclosed in a strong light.
Her eyes are level with her face; she has heavy and spongy eyelids and
a big mouth which stirs with ruminated sorrow. Fresh tears increase
the dimensions of her eyes, make them sparkle and varnish the points of
her cheeks. She comes and goes with undiminished spleen. Her wrinkles
form heavy moldings on her face, and the skin of chin and neck is so
folded that it looks intestinal, while the crude light tinges it all
with something like blood.