Alice: An Adultery

interruption as Mr. Shandy, and from behind the hideous yellow partition came sounds as of the constant babbling of a human voice. Repeated glances in this direction drew from my enter- tainer the information that it was “ only her husband,” indicating the yellow-haired girl with the stem of her short clay pipe. She added that he was dying. Curiosity, Compassion’s Siamese twin, prompted a desire to see the sufferer. The old lady rose, not without difficulty, lifted the curtain, and let it fall behind me as I entered the gloom which lay beyond. On a bed, in that half-fathomed twilight, big with the scent of joss-sticks smouldering in a saucer before a little bronze Buddha-rupa, lay a man, still young, the traces of rare beauty in his face, though worn with suffering and horrid with a week’s growth of beard. He was murmuring over to himself some words which I could not catch, but my entrance, though he did not notice me, seemed to rouse him a little. iv