Cosmos - pg. 12

We waited on the top step, my head was still buzzing with the journey, the clatter of the train, the events of the day before, the crowds, the fumes, the din. The noise in my head was deafening. I was startled by a strange deformity in the decent, domesticated, blue eyed face of the woman who opened the door. Her mouth seemed to be excessively prolonged to one side, though only to an infinitesimal extent, perhaps about a millimetre, but when she spoke this imparted a darting or gliding, almost reptilian, motion to her upper lip. There was a repellent coldness, like that of a frog or snake, about those lateral movements of her mouth, but in spite of that the woman warmed and excited m, for there was a kind of obscure transition leading straight to her bed, to gliding, creeping sin. Also her voice surprised me. I don't know what I expected to come from that mouth of hers, but the voice with which she spoke was that of the ordinary, stoutish, middle-aged, domestic servant that she was. Next I heard it from inside the house.