The gathering of the clouds enthralled her, whether they were lumped together in little balls or rolls, or separated into great soft masses, or dragged out in streaks. She relished the black congestion of the rain clouds, as they sank helplessly down on their swollen stomachs before bursting. The water poured over her roof, over her soft grass, and over the spindly frame of her laburnum tree. It could not touch her. She stayed inside, near a closed window, and watched the glass run down. She said the rain had a smell. To prove it, she opened her kitchen door after a storm and tasted without pleasure the cool steam rising up from her relaxed garden earth. She raised her eyes at the same time to see how the sky drew back relieved and clean.

As long as the light of day lasted, she kept looking up as often as she got the chance. She was ashamed to be seen standing in her garden or in the street looking up. She thought the others might think her queer.

At times, more when she was a young woman than later on, she took a bus out to the country, where she could sit on a wall or lie down on the grass and give herself up to her stare. More often she took a ride on the top of an open tram, and watched the sky slyly from under the brim of her hat, and imagined that she was ploughing a soft furrow in it with the top of her head as the tram rushed her along.

She could see the clouds easily from the windows of her house, but then she considered the neighbors. It disgusted her to think they might see her standing looking out, and perhaps imagine she had some interest in what they did, so she kept away from the windows except when she had to clean them.

One time she was recovering from the flu. She got out of bed for the first time on a Sunday afternoon, and Hubert brought up a comfortable chair from downstairs and put it near the bedroom window, with a low stool before it for her feet. She lay back in the cushions there, lying low in her shawl and in her loose brown hair, and passively watched the sky. The next day she felt strong enough to go downstairs, and she never sat there like that again; but years later, all the same, she could recall every line of the sky on that evening when she lay there weak from her sickness.

That evening the clouds met and parted and rose and descended in a way that she never forgot. Their deliberations were delightful, as they touched back to back and front to front, and slid alongside each other, and melted slowly into each other and slowly drew apart, and folded each other with blind white stretchings and opened themselves freely into long uneasy yawns. At last the light behind them grew very strong and seemed about to break through, but to her satisfaction, because she did not trust the brash pure light, it began its final retreat, a long slow fading, until she realized with surprise that she had witnessed the full twilight and that night had arrived before her eyes.