“She hates it,” said he; “she has never been well since we came here.”
She was white, poor little girl, as the paper on which this is written, and very frail-looking, but it never seemed to occur to anyone that it would be well to open the double windows, and so close was the air of the room that it made me feel sick and faint.
“She never goes out,” said her husband. “She is not well enough.”
I believe there was a time in our grandmothers' days when we too dreaded the fresh air.
And in this the town differed markedly from any Australian towns I have known. The double windows were all tight shut these warm July days, with all the cracks stopped up with cotton wool, with often decorations of coloured ribbons or paper wandering across the space between. Also there were very heavy shutters, and I thought these must be to shut out the winter storms, but M. Pauloff did not seem to think much of the winter storms, though he admitted they had some bad blizzards and regularly the thermometer went down below -40° Fahrenheit.
“No,” he said, “we shut them at night, at four in the winter and at nine in the summer. Leave them open you cannot.”
“But why?” I thought it was some device for keeping out still more air.
“There is danger,” said he—“danger from men.”
“Do they steal?” said I, surprised.
“And kill,” he added with conviction.