She hesitated again until she saw the skylight windows above her head; but they were covered with soot and let in a dim northern light.

Rango then stood aside, and Djuna saw Zora lying in bed.

Her black hair was uncombed and straggled around her parchment-colored skin. She had no Indian blood, and her face was almost a direct contrast to Rango's. She had heavy, pronounced features, a wide full mouth, all cast in length, in sadness, a defeated pull downward which only changed when she raised her eyelids; then the eyes had in them an unexpected shrewdness which Rango did not have.

She was wearing one of Rango's shirts, and over that a kimono which had been dyed black. The red and black squares of the shirt's colors showed at the neck and wrists. The stripes once yellow still showed through the black dye of the kimono.

On her feet she wore a pair of Rango's big socks filled with cotton wool at the toes, which seemed like disproportionate clown's feet on her small body.

Her shoulders were slightly hunched, and she smiled the smile of the hunchback, of a cripple. The arching of her shoulders gave her an air of having shrunk herself together to occupy a small space. It was the arch of fear.

Even before her illness, Djuna felt, she could never have been handsome but had a strength of character which must have been arresting. Yet her hands were childish and clasped things without firmness. And in the mouth there was the same lack of control. Her voice, too, was childish.

The studio was now half in darkness, and the oil lamp which Rango brought cast long shadows.

The mist of dampness in the room seemed like the breath of the buried, making the walls weep, detaching the wallpaper in long wilted strips. The sweat of centuries of melancholic living, the dampness of roots and cemeteries, the moisture of agony and death seeping through the walls seemed appropriate to Zora's skin from which all glow and life had withdrawn.

Djuna was moved by Zora's smile and plaintive voice. Zora was saying: "The other day I went to church and prayed desperately that someone should save us, and now you are here. Rango is always bewildered, and does nothing." Then she turned to Rango: "Bring me my sewing box."

Rango brought her a tin cracker box which contained needles, threads, and buttons in boxes labeled with medicine names: injections, drops, pills.

The material Zora took up to sew looked like a rag. Her small hands smoothed it down mechanically, yet the more she smoothed it down the more it wilted in her hands, as if her touch were too anxious, too compressing, as if she transmitted to objects some obnoxious withering breath from her sick flesh.

And when she began to sew she sewed with small stitches, closely overlapping, so closely that it was as if she were strangling the last breath of color and life in the rag, as if she were sewing it to the point of suffocation.