Mary took up her knitting. She was making a little vest for Essy's baby. Rowcliffe watched it growing under her hands.
"As I can't knit, do you mind my smoking?"
She didn't.
"If more women knitted," he said, "it would be a good thing. They wouldn't be bothered so much with nerves."
"I don't do it for nerves. I haven't any," said Mary.
He laughed. "No, I don't think you have."
She fell into one of her gentle silences. A silence not of her own brooding, he judged. It had no dreams behind it and no imagination that carried her away. A silence, rather, that brought her nearer to him, that waited on his mood.
His eyes watched under half-closed lids the movements of her hands and the pretty droop of her head. And he said to himself, "How sweet she is. And how innocent. And good."
Their chairs were set near together in the small plot of grass. The little trees of the orchard shut them in. He began to notice things about her that he had not noticed before, the shape and color of her finger nails, the modeling of her supple wrists, the way her ears were curved and laid close to her rather broad head. He saw that her skin was milk-white at the throat, and honey-white at her ears, and green-white, the white of an elder flower, at the roots of her red hair.
And as she unwound her ball of wool it rolled out of her lap and fell between her feet.