"Well, I can do that for you--for nothing."
To write this letter I had to sit down at my writing-table.
"May I peep and see what you write about me?"
I could not take offence at her curiosity.
"I'll help you!" said she, with naïve archness, and went and stood behind my back.
I must say that she had a very odd notion of helping me. She leant right over me so that I could feel her burning breath on my face, and the throbbing of her heart against my shoulder. I spoiled the first sheet of paper by writing last year's date at the top of it. Then I could not call to mind the name of my client, and I thought one thing and wrote another. Add to that that I made a mess of the simplest sentences, and wrote in a style worthy of a pedantic grammarian. Finally I got hopelessly involved in the maze of a long-winded phrase which I began but could not finish. That's what happens to a man when he has to listen to the beating of two hearts!
It was on this self-same table that the picture stood which I have already mentioned. I had no time to conceal it in my drawer. And why should I have tried to hide it? Was I bound to make a mystery of it before her?
Right opposite to my writing-table was a mirror on the wall. On one occasion, when I was pursuing an elusive word, I raised my head from my writing-desk and saw in the mirror the figure of the woman who was standing behind my back. Oh, what a face was that! She was not looking into my letter, but at the portrait. The eyes were turned sideways, so that the upper parts of the whites were visible; the lips were drawn aside, and the teeth clenched.
I saw this from the mirror. And this mirror, too had the property of making things look green. Viewed in this magic light, the fair lady standing behind me appeared like the Iblis of the _Thousand-and-one Nights_, who sucks the blood of her lovers and leads the dances of the dead.
Then I dried it with a piece of blotting-paper. Sand I have always hated. I also felt, in this respect, like Stephen Szechenyi,[44] who, whenever he received a sanded-letter, used to give it first of all to his lackey to be taken out in the hall and dusted. Before enclosing the letter, however, I turned round and handed it to her.