While she was talking like this she had lighted the gas and with
the last words she glided through the bedroom door leaving me
thunderstruck at the unexpected character of her thoughts.
I couldn't know that there had been during my absence a case of
atrocious murder which had affected the imagination of the whole
town; and though Therese did not read the papers (which she
imagined to be full of impieties and immoralities invented by
godless men) yet if she spoke at all with her kind, which she must
have done at least in shops, she could not have helped hearing of
it. It seems that for some days people could talk of nothing else.
She returned gliding from the bedroom hermetically sealed in her
black shawl just as she had gone in, with the protruding hand
holding the lighted candle and relieved my perplexity as to her
morbid turn of mind by telling me something of the murder story in
a strange tone of indifference even while referring to its most
horrible features. "That's what carnal sin (peche de chair) leads
to," she commented severely and passed her tongue over her thin
lips. "And then the devil furnishes the occasion."
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