““He found her seated on her veranda steps, picking grass seeds out of a pair of old khaki army socks. About sixty, with the kind of pale skin that should never see the sun, she wore shorts, a sleeveless work shirt and fraying white sand-shoes. A solid figure, concentrating hard, tugging at and flicking away the seeds with a terrible fixedness, sometimes peering at them through her glasses, sometimes over them, as if the seeds swam in her vision either way.””
