He looked at her, she looked at him:it had happened. The mole would not be forced to admit that it had been intended for an antelope.The Director found her among her files and rolled maps and, standing solemnly under a row of family portraits donated to the Institute on the grounds that it would be impious to hang them, as was then fashionable, in the bathroom, announced that the Cary estate had at last been settled in favour of the Institute. This year, however, she was due to escape the shaming moment of realization. Yet,when the weather turned and the sun filtered into even her basement windows,when the sunbeams were laden with spring dust and the old tin ashtrays began to stink of a winter of nicotine and contemplation, the flaws in her plodding private world were made public, even to her, for although she loved old shabby things, things that had already been loved and suffered, objects with a past,when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and valueless, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast. Trivia which she used to remind herself that long ago the outside world had existed, that there was more to today than yesterday with its yellowing paper and browning ink and maps that tended to shatter when they were unfolded. He might have been more of a somebody than we thought, even if he did drink.” So she had retrieved from their generosity a Christmas card from the trenches with a celluloid boot on it, a parchment poem to Chinga cousy Township graced with a wreath of human hair, a signed photograph of the founder of a seed company long ago absorbed by a competitor. “Lug it all down to the Historical Institute.
Her basement room at the Institute was close to the steam pipes and protectively lined with books, wooden filing cabinets and very old, brown, framed photographs of unlikely people: General Booth and somebody’s Grandma Town, France from the air in 1915, groups of athletes and sappers things people brought her because she would not throw them out, because it was herjob to keep them. She lived close to her work and shopped on the way between her apartment and the Institute, scurrying hastily through the tube of winter from refuge to refuge, wasting no time.
In the winter, she lived like a mole, buried deep in her office, digging among maps and manuscripts.
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