There were other groups that crowded the doorsteps; there were young
mothers that sat there, with their babes clasped to the full breasts,
in whose eyes was to be read the satisfied passion of recent
motherhood; there were gay clusters of young Norman maidens, whose
glances, brilliant and restless, were pregnant with all the meaning of
unspent youth. The figures of the fishermen, toiling up the street with
bared legs and hairy breast, bending beneath their baskets alive with
fish, stopped to have a word or two, seasoned with a laugh, with these
latter groups. There were also knots of patient old men, wrecks that
the sea had tossed back to earth, to rot and die there, that came out
of the black little houses to rest their bones in the sun. And
everywhere there were groups of old women, or of women still young, to
whom the look of age had come long before its due time.

The village seemed peopled with women, sexless creatures for the most
part, whom toil and the life on the mussel-bed or in the field had
dried and hardened into mummy shapes. Only these, the old and the
useless, were left at home to rear the younger generation and to train
them to take up the same heavy burden of life. The coifs of these old
hags made dazzling spots of brightness against the gray of the walls
and the stuccoed houses; clustered together, the high caps that nodded
in unison to the chatter were in startling contrast to the bronzed
faces bending over the fish-nets, and to the blue-veined, leathery
hands that flew in and out of the coarse meshes with the fluent ease of
long practice.

With one of these old women we became friends. We had made her
acquaintance at a poetic moment, under romantic circumstances. We were
all three watching a sunset, under a pink sky; we were sitting far out