Her first blood bewildered her. She did not know what it meant and the first stirrings of surmise that ever she felt were directed towards its possible cause. The moon had been shining into the kit when she woke to feel the trickle betweehighs and it seemed to her that a wolf who, perhaps, was fond of her, as wolves were, and who lived, perhaps, in the moon? must have nibbled her t while she was sleeping, had subjected her to a series of affeate nips too geo wake her yet sharp enough to break the skin. The shape of this theory was blurred yet, out of it, there took root a kind of wild reasoning, as it might have from a seed dropped in her brain off the foot of a flying bird.
The flow tinued for a few days, which seemed to her an eime. She had, as yet, no direotion of past, or of future, or of duration, only of a dimensionless, immediate moment. At night, she prowled the empty house looking fs to sop the blood up; she had learned a little elementary hygiene in the vent, enough to know how to bury her excrement and se herself of her natural juices, although the nuns had not the means to inform her how it should be, it was not fastidiousness but shame that made her do so.
She found towels, sheets and pillowcases in closets that had not been opened sihe Duke came shrieking into the world with all his teeth, to bite his mothers nipple off and weep. She found once-worn ball dresses in cobwebbed wardrobes, and, heaped in the er of his bloody chamber, shrouds, nightdresses and burial clothes that had ed items on the Dukes menus. She tore strips of the most absorbent fabrics to clumsily diaper herself. In the course of these prowlings, she bumped against that mirror over whose surface the Duke passed like a wind on ice. First, she tried to nuzzle her refle; then, nosing it industriously, she soon realised it gave out no smell. She bruised her muzzle on the cold glass and broke her claws trying to tussle with this stranger. She saw, with irritation, then amusement, how it mimicked every gesture of hers when she raised her forepaw to scratch herself ed her bum along the dusty carpet to rid herself of a slight disfort in her hindquarters. She rubbed her head against her reflected face, to show that she felt friendly towards it, a a cold, solid, immovable surface between herself and she -- some kind, possibly, of invisible cage? In spite of this barrier, she was lonely enough to ask this creature to try to play with her, barieeth and grinning: at once she received a reciprocal invitation. She rejoiced; she began to whirl round on herself, yappiantly, but, whereated from the mirror, she halted in the midst of her ecstasy, puzzled, to see how her new friend grew less in size.
The moonlight spilled into the Dukes motionless bedroom from behind a cloud and she saw how pale this wolf, not-wolf who played with her was. The moon and mirrors have this mu on: you ot see behind them. Moonlit and white, Wolf-Alice looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether there she saw the beast who came to bite her in the night. Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kit, she entered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innoce.
Soon the flow ceased. She fot it. The moon vanished; but, little by little, reappeared. When it again visited