He took us up
a broad flight of stairs, through a large dormitory--oh, if you only knew
what I saw there! I was so horribly frightened, I'd never been in such a
place before--to a cell. And the walls and the floor were padded.'
Margaret passed her hand across her forehead to chase away the
recollection of that awful sight.
'Oh, I see it still. I can never get it out of my mind.'
She remembered with a morbid vividness the vast misshapen mass which
she had seen heaped strangely in one corner. There was a slight movement
in it as they entered, and she perceived that it was a human being. It
was a woman, dressed in shapeless brown flannel; a woman of great stature
and of a revolting, excessive corpulence. She turned upon them a huge,
impassive face; and its unwrinkled smoothness gave it an appearance of
aborted childishness. The hair was dishevelled, grey, and scanty. But
what most terrified Margaret was that she saw in this creature an
appalling likeness to Oliver.
'He told me it was his mother, and she'd been there for five-and-twenty
years.
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