She raised the candlestick again. She passed out of the bedroom and crept, guilty and afraid, towards the kitchen. She knew the full enormity of her offence, could never, afterwards, offer the excuse that she did not realize it. On the other hand, she was helpless in the grip of the tyrannical appetite which drove her on. At the open door of the narrow kitchen she listened intently, with a guilty and fearful eye on the shadowy staircase, trying to see what was not there. Not a sound. Not a vibration. The last tram-car and the last Underground train had gone. She entered the kitchen, closed the door softly, and shut herself up with her sin. "I will not do it. I cannot do it!" she thought, but she knew that she would do it, and that she was appointed to do it. Her mouth watered; her stomach ravened within her like a tiger.
Ten minutes later the door opened suddenly. Mrs. Earlforward, a mantle over her night-dress, stood in the doorway. In the flickering light of the candle Mrs. Earlforward caught the gluttonous, ecstatic expression on Elsie's face and the curve of her pretty lips before the corners of the lips fell to dismay, and the rapt expression changed to despairing delinquency. Mr. Earlforward's grand bluff had failed after all. Apparently not the atmosphere of death could cure Elsie of her vice. Mrs. Earlforward, on the top of her other thrilling woes, was horrified to see Elsie not merely eating bacon, but eating bacon raw. But in this particular Mrs. Earlforward was unreasonable. The girl could not cook the bacon. To do so would have caused throughout the house a smell to wake even the dead. She had no alternative but to eat the bacon raw. Moreover, it was very nice raw. Mrs. Earlforward tried to speak about the bacon, but failed. Elsie, with her mouth full and no chance of emptying it, could not speak either. The tap, dripping much faster now than aforetime, talked alone. At last Mrs. Earlforward gasped:
During the day Henry had asked several times for bulletins as to Elsie's consumption of food, and he received them with satisfaction, but also with a certain sardonic air new in Violet's experience of him. This demeanour was one of the things that disquieted Violet. Another was that, contrary to his habit of solicitude for her, he made absolutely no inquiry as to her own health, though he surely ought to have been ever so little disturbed about it. And another was that he no longer showed his customary quiet pleasure in being worried over her. After taking some soft food he demanded a toothpick, and had employed himself with it in the most absurd way for quite an hour. In answer to her questions he said blandly again and again that he was all right. Soon after nightfall he insisted that the electricity should be switched off. Violet refused, as she was determined to watch him carefully. He said that the light hurt his eyes. She took the paper lining from a tray in her wardrobe and fashioned a shade for the lamp--the first shade ever known in that house.