One might think of him as a powerful person, almost hideously powerful. You will see, as you read, how he has got me in his power and is making me serve his purpose. And he had caught and was holding the woman in his grip. He had wanted her—quite absolutely, and had taken her—as all men, perhaps, want to do with their women, and don’t quite dare. Perhaps too she was in her own way greedy and he was making actual love to her always day and night, when they were together and when they were apart. I’ll admit I am confused about the whole matter myself. I am trying to express something I have felt, not in myself, nor in the words that came to me from the lips of the hunchback girl whom, you will remember, I left kneeling on the floor in that back room and peeking through a keyhole. There she was, you see, the hunchback, and in the room before her were the man and woman and the hunchback girl also had fallen under the power of the man Wilson. She also was in love with him—there can be no doubt of that. The room in which she knelt was dark and dusty. There must have been a thick accumulation of dust on the floor. What she said—or if she did not say the words what she made me feel was that the man Wilson worked in the room, or walked up and down in there before his woman, and that, while he did that, his woman sat in the chair, and that there was in her face, in her eyes, a look— He was all the time making love to her, and his making love to her in just that abstract way, was a kind of love-making with all people? and that was possible because the woman was as purely physical as he was something else. If all this is meaningless to you, at least it wasn’t to the hunchback girl—who certainly was uneducated and never would have set herself up as having any special powers of understanding. She knelt in the dust, listening, and looking in at the keyhole, and in the end she came to feel that the man, in whose presence she had never been and whose person had never in any way touched her person, had made love to her also. She had felt that and it had gratified her entire nature. One might say it had satisfied her. She was what she was and it had made life worth living for her. * * * * * Minor things happened in the room and one may speak of them. For example, there was a day in June, a dark warm rainy day. The hunchback girl was in her room, kneeling on the floor, and Wilson and his woman were in their room. Wilson’s woman had been doing a family washing, and as it could not be dried outdoors she had stretched ropes across the room and had hung the clothes inside. When the clothes were all hung Wilson came from walking outside in the rain and going to the desk sat down and began to write. He wrote for a few minutes and then got up and went about the room, and in walking a wet garment brushed against his face.