I have stared
stupidly into the fire or at the dripping branches of the trees
opposite my windows. I have walked the streets in dull misery.
I have sought solace in the Zoological Gardens.
There is a kindly brown bear who pleads humanly for buns, and her
I have fed into a sort of friendship. I stand vacantly in front
of the cage finding in the beast an odd companionable sympathy.
She turns her head on one side, regards me with melting brown
eyes, and squatting on her haunches thrusts her paws beseechingly
through the bars. Just so did Carlotta beseech and plead. I
have bemused myself with gnostic and metempsychosic speculations.
Carlotta as an ordinary human being with an immortal soul did not
exist, and what I had known and loved was but a simulacrum of
female form containing an elemental spirit doomed to be ever
seeking a fresh habitat. It was but the lingering ghost of the
humanised shell of air that was seen at Victoria station. The
fateful spirit, untrammelled by the conventions of men and
actuated by destinies unintelligible to mortal mind, had informed
the carcass of this little brown bear, which looks at me so
strangely, so coaxingly, with Carlotta's eyes and Carlotta's
gestures.
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