Deadening myself, repeating to myself that I live the daily life of a slug, in corruption and degradation, I can look no higher and am not subjected to fits of racking bitterness or violent grief which is nobler but hurts too much.

I am allowed out in the town in his litter, guarded and watched of course by the litter bearers. No chance of escape, and I wouldn’t anyway without Narra.

It is fresh air, of course, but very boring; just a provincial little mountain town with a couple of squalid streets debouching on brown hill-slopes—if you don’t count the palace lanes which are more like avenues but only for private traffic. Apart from that, it is depressing to see the poverty there as opposed to the fairness of the palace. The beggars may not sell bent nails and scraps of paper as the ones Narra told me about, but they lie in the gutters with the flies and crawling-insects thick on their sores, their arm-stumps or their blind eyes festering, too weak or their senses too atrophied even to lift their alms-bowls as we pass.

The money Yle buys a new comb with would keep a family like that in food for a half-year—for most of them are starving.

Today I took the litter of my own volition. As it passed through the courtyard I saw Urns being groomed in his stable; he lifted his head frantically at the sight of me, kicking over the man with him, but I was gone before I could see him more.

I had taken a bag of coins from the governor’s coffer, which is not well guarded and from which most of the girls are allowed to take for anything they need, and whenever we passed a beggar I threw a handful of the coins. We were late returning and he had been calling for me for a half-hour. I went up the stairs to him as he roared over the banister.

“Where have you been, you Northern little slut?”

“I went into the town.”

“Why were you so a really nasty word late?”

I told him. I was not as splendidly defiant about it as I would have wanted to be. The morning had gone less well than I’d expected; in fact, as is always the case with good deeds, it had got out of hand. The litter had been followed by hordes of yelling, unclean creatures with neither respect nor gratitude, even attempting to leap into the litter and tug the gold from my hand. When the litter bearers tried to restrain them they retaliated, and one of the bearers had nearly been knifed. When I tossed money to the poor wretches lying blind and sore in the gutters the others leapt upon it and tore it from their bowls before they could even realize what they had been given.