n, tall, thin, and gray-haired.
Silently she stood there, her great, dark eyes, still and sad, looking
at me as much as to say, "By what right are you here?"

"Excuse me, madam," was my involuntary beginning; then I somewhat
stupidly asked for a glass of water.

"I would not advise you to drink the water we have here; it is not
good," replied the woman. I knew it was not; the water is never good
down on the levels. But I was very stupid that day.

"I should like to rest a while," was my next attempt. It brought out a
wooden chair, but no cordiality. I tried everything I could think of in
the way of subjects for conversation, but elicited no replies beyond
monosyllables. I could not very well say, "Who are you, and how came you
here?" and yet that was exactly what I wanted to know. The woman's face
baffled me, and I do not like to be baffled. It was a face that was old
and at the same time young; it had deep lines, it was colorless, and the
heavy hair was gray; and still I felt that it was not old in years, but
that it was like the peaches we find sometimes on the ground, old,
wrinkled, and withered, yet showing here and there traces of that
evanescent bloom which comes before the ripeness. The eyes haunted me;
they haunt me now, the dry, still eyes of immovable, hopeless grief. I
thought, "Oh, if I could only help her!" but all I said was, "I fear I
am keeping you standing"; for that is the senseless way we human
creatures talk to each other.

Her answer was not encouraging.

"Yes," she replied, in her brief way, and said no more.

I felt myself obliged to go.

But the next afternoon I wandered that way again, and the next, and the
next. I used to wait impatiently for the hour when I could enter into
the presence of her great silence. How still she was! If she had wept,
if she had raved, if she had worked with nervous energy, or been
resolutely, doggedly idle, if she had seemed reckless, or callous, or
even pious; but no, she was none of these. Her old-young face was ever
the same, and she went about her few household tasks in a steady,
nerveless manner, as though she could go on doing them for countless
ages, and yet never with the least increase of energy. She swept the
room, for instance, every day, never thoroughly, but in a gentle,
incompetent sort of way peculiarly her own; yet she always swept it and
never neglected it, and she took as much time to do it as though the
task was to be performed with microsc