Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty
snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I
wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and
her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face
were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like
stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my
black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider.

She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she
held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch
at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish,
rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking
spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging
near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like
a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the
coarse, blackish worsted she was making.

All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the
fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old,
natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey
nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub, between
thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her apron, the
heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the fleece as she
drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that issued, and the
bobbin spun swiftly.

Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were
dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a
sun-worn stone.