stockinged feet to the door between the rooms and peek through the keyhole. She had to kneel on the dusty floor to do it.
The life in the room fascinated her from the beginning. Sometimes the man was in there alone, sitting at the kitchen table and writing the stuff he afterwards put into the book I collared and from which I have quoted; sometimes the woman was with him, and again sometimes he was in there alone, but wasn't writing. Then he was always walking and walking up and down.
When both people were in the room and when the man was writing the woman seldom moved, but sat in a chair by one of the windows with her hands crossed. He would write a few lines and then walk up and down talking to himself or to her. When he spoke she did not answer except with her eyes, the crippled girl said.
What I gathered of all this from her talk with me and what is the product of my own imaginings I confess I do not quite know.
Anyway what I got and what I am trying in my own way to transmit to you is a sense of a kind of strangeness in the relationship of the two. It wasn't just a domestic household, a little down on its luck, by any means. He was trying to do something very difficult—with his poetry I presume, and she in her own way was trying to help him.
And of course, as I have no doubt you have gathered from what I have quoted of Wilson's verse, the matter had something to do with the relationships between people—not necessarily between the particular man and woman who happened to be there in that room, but between all people.
The fellow had some half-mystic conception of all such things, and before he found his own woman, had been going aimlessly about the world looking for a mate. Then he had found the woman in the Kansas town and, he at least thought, things had cleared, for him.
Well, he had the notion that no one in the world could think or feel anything alone and that people only got into trouble and walled themselves in by trying it, or something of the sort. There was a discord. Things were jangled. Someone it seems had to strike a pitch that all voices could take up before the real song of life could begin. Mind you I'm not putting forth any notions of my own. What I am trying to do is to give you a sense of something I got from having read Wilson's stuff, from having known
