Imaginative, for once, in her morbid fatigue, she
began to wish that she could fade away and become part of the fog that
lay about London, be drawn into its murkiness, with all her murky
recollections, her fiendish knowledge, her mechanical wiles of the
streets, her thin and ghostly despairs and desires. For they seemed thin
and ghostly, they too, to-day, fit food for the fog, as indeed the whole
of her was. How could such as she evaporate into sweet air, a clear
heaven?
She caught at the hand-glass, leaning far out on the bed, as the blessed
damozel o'er the bright bar of heaven, and tried to see, with staring
eyes, how the new hair-dye that she was now using became her. Her mind
was vagrant, coming and going miserably, from that love of hers which was
strangely strong and subtle, to the powder-box with its arsenic-green
lid, or the rouge-pot of dirty white china. And by each event it paused
and sank, as if benumbed by the increasing frost. Leaning again to put
back the hand-glass she fell over too far and dropped it. The glass fell
face downwards and was smashed. Cuckoo laughed aloud, revelling feebly in
the additional misery a superstitious mind now began to promise her. The
fragments of broken glass actually pleased her, and, on a sudden, she
resolved to set her feet in them, that she might be cut and wounded, that
she might bleed outwardly as she had been bleeding inwardly for so long.
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