Looking into her face, you wouldn’t know that. You had to see her doing it, because I don’t think you can imagine that. She did it with a look. She didn’t look—her eyes saw everything from the inside ... when she was at it. That was like cold fervor, but no that wasn’t. That was (she shook her head just a little) two things at once, you can’t imagine. Enthusiasm, or mania, maybe, and dreaminess at the same time. None of it was not real to her, though. I knew that not one single thing about it was unreal. Or vague—or anything but sharp and distinct. It’s ridiculous to say sharp but that’s the word. When she was at it, her eyes were like black wells, with glistens all over them. (She caressed the air by her knees with stiff old hands, seeming to coax the guillotine blade out of the sparkling air so that I for a moment actually saw it.) All pupil, that seemed, staring, and seeing backwards.

And I saw her, or I watched her, you couldn’t have observed her more closely than I did. I had my perches there to watch her from, that gave me a commanding view, unauthorized though. Never paid much attention to them, only to her. I saw them, naturally, but as she saw them. Or would have seen them, if she saw them from the outside, and she didn’t, didn’t seem to. No, she saw them inside, and I saw them outside, but I saw into her. She knew exactly how that was done, and she lived that through each of them, or that was her fantasy.