her wrist; and though at first she wouldn''t let me touch her bare hands, in time—since I said I would be gentle— she began to let me. When her fingernails grew long I cut them, with a pair of silver scissors she had, that were shaped like a flying bird. Her nails were soft and perfectly clean, and grew quickly, like a child''s nails. When I cut, she flinched. The skin of her hands was smooth—but, like the rest of her, too smooth to be right, I never saw it without thinking of the things—rough things, sharp things— that would mark or hurt it. I was glad when she put her gloves back on. The slivers of nail that I had cut away I would gather up out of my lap and throw on the fire. She would stand and watch them turn black. She did the same with the hairs I drew from her brushes and combs—frowning while they wriggled on the coals, like worms, then flared and turned to ash. Sometimes I''d stand and look with
her.
For there weren''t the things to notice, at Briar, that there were at home. You watched, instead, things like that: the rising of smoke, the passing of clouds in the sky. Each day we walked to the river, to see how it had lifted or dropped. ''In the autumn, it floods,'' Maud said, ''and all the rushes are drowned. I don''t care for that. And some nights a white mist comes creeping from the water, almost to the walls of my uncle''s house . . .'' She shivered. She always said, my uncle''s, she never said my. The ground was crisp, and when it gave beneath our boots she said: ''How brittle the grass is! I think the river will freeze. I think it is freezing already. Do you see how it struggles? It wants to flow, but the cold will still it. Do you see, Sue? Here, among the rushes?''