moved. Her eyes remained candid and open and unconscious as the skies.
Only a sharp will in them now and then seemed to gleam at me, as if to
dominate me.

Her shuttle had caught in a dead chicory plant, and spun no more. She
did not notice. I stooped and broke off the twigs. There was a glint of
blue on them yet. Seeing what I was doing, she merely withdrew a few
inches from the plant. Her bobbin hung free.

She went on with her tale, looking at me wonderfully. She seemed like
the Creation, like the beginning of the world, the first morning. Her
eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.

Her thread broke. She seemed to take no notice, but mechanically picked
up the shuttle, wound up a length of worsted, connected the ends from
her wool strand, set the bobbin spinning again, and went on talking, in
her half-intimate, half-unconscious fashion, as if she were talking to
her own world in me.

So she stood in the sunshine on the little platform, old and yet like
the morning, erect and solitary, sun-coloured, sun-discoloured, whilst I
at her elbow, like a piece of night and moonshine, stood smiling into
her eyes, afraid lest she should deny me existence.

Which she did. She had stopped talking, did not look at me any more, but
went on with her spinning, the brown shuttle twisting gaily. So she
stood, belonging to the sunshine and the weather, taking no more notice
of me than of the dark-stained caper-bush which hung from the wall above
her head, whilst I, waiting at her side, was like the moon in the
daytime sky, overshone, obliterated, in spite of my black clothes.