Occasionally, I saw her drunk, with bleary eyes, tousled
hair, and a particularly hideous grin. On such occasions she would
speak to me.
"How d'ye do, Mr. Student!" and her stupid laugh would still further
intensify my loathing of her. I should have liked to have changed my
quarters in order to have avoided such encounters and greetings; but
my little chamber was a nice one, and there was such a wide view from
the window, and it was always so quiet in the street below--so I
endured.
And one morning I was sprawling on my couch, trying to find some sort
of excuse for not attending my class, when the door opened, and the
bass voice of Teresa the loathsome resounded from my threshold:
"Good health to you, Mr. Student!"
"What do you want?" I said. I saw that her face was confused and
supplicatory... It was a very unusual sort of face for her.
"Sir! I want to beg a favour of you. Will you grant it me?"
I lay there silent, and thought to myself:
"Gracious!... Courage, my boy!"
"I want to send a letter home, that's what it is," she said; her voice
was beseeching, soft, timid.
"Deuce take you!" I thought; but up I jumped, sat down at my table,
took a sheet of paper, and said:
"Come here, sit down, and dictate!"
She came, sat down very gingerly on a chair, and looked at me with a
guilty look.
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