'You are spinning,' I said to her.

Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention.

'Yes,' she said.

She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of
the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained
like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking
for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to
time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was
slightly more animated than the sunshine and the stone and the
motionless caper-bush above her. Still her fingers went along the strand
of fleece near her breast.

'That is an old way of spinning,' I said.

'What?'

She looked up at me with eyes clear and transcendent as the heavens. But
she was slightly roused. There was the slight motion of the eagle in her
turning to look at me, a faint gleam of rapt light in her eyes. It was
my unaccustomed Italian.

'That is an old way of spinning,' I repeated.

'Yes--an old way,' she repeated, as if to say the words so that they
should be natural to her. And I became to her merely a transient
circumstance, a man, part of the surroundings. We divided the gift of
speech, that was all.