was a bit damp. I had had a pain in the back of my neck for two whole
days. The sooner I got at my novel and finished it up the better, I
reflected. Then I could go off to the baths somewhere. But would I
ever settle down to work? Would the plumbers ever get off the place?
(They were the ones I seemed to suspect the most.)

Suddenly, as I sat there ruminating, I became acutely aware of something
white on the ledge of the topmost window in the eastern tower. Even
as I fixed my gaze upon it, something else transpired. A cloud of soft,
wavy, luxurious brown hair eclipsed the narrow white strip and hung
with spreading splendour over the casement ledge, plainly, indubitably
to dry in the sun!

My neighbour had washed her hair!

And it was really a most wonderful head of hair. I can't remember ever
having seen anything like it, except in the advertisements.

For a long time I sat there trying to pierce the blackness of the room
beyond the window with my straining eyes, deeply sensitive to a
curiosity that had as its basic force the very natural anxiety to know
what disposition she had made of the rest of her person in order to
obtain this rather startling effect.

Of course, I concluded, she was lying on a couch of some description,
with her head in the window. That was quite clear, even to a dreamer.
And perhaps she was reading a novel while the sun shone. My fancy went
to the remotest ends of probability: she might even be reading one of
mine!