I don’t want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough. 

 I’m feeling ever so much better! I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime. 

 In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing. 

 There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously. 

 It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. 

 But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. 

 It creeps all over the house. 

 I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. 

 It gets into my hair. 

 Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell! 

 Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. 

 It is not bad—at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. 

 In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. 

 It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell. 

 But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell. 

 There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over. 

 I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round—round and round 

 Prev. P 12/17 next