Part Two - Home Life

July 20.

The heat was appalling even early in the morning, right after breakfast.
There were always three or four such terrific days, even up here in the
mountains, to remind you that you lived in America and had to take your
part of the ferocious extremes of the American climate.

And of course this had to be the time when Touclé went off for one of
her wandering disappearances. Marise could tell that by the aspect of
the old woman as she entered the kitchen that morning, her reticule bag
bulging out with whatever mysterious provisions Touclé took with her.
You never missed anything from the kitchen.

Marise felt herself in such a nervously heightened state of
sensitiveness to everything and everybody in those days, that it did not
surprise her to find that for the first time she received something more
than a quaint and amusing impression from the old aborigine. She had
never noticed it before, but sometimes there was something about
Touclé's strange, battered, leathery old face . . . what was it? The idea
came to her a new one, that Touclé was also a person, not merely a
curious and enigmatic phenomenon.

Touclé was preparing to depart in the silent, unceremonious,
absent-minded way she did everything, as though she were the only person
in the world. She opened the screen door, stepped out into the torrid
glare of the sunshine and, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure, trudged
down the path.