Page "fiction" Paragraph 904

He saw the surprise in her face, and laughed as though it were the funniest expression he had ever seen.

He kept on laughing until she started laughing with him.

He had a deep voice which was full of good food she had cooked, and good humor ; ;

an explosive laugh which always carried everything before it.

He would settle himself into his seat to laugh.

Whenever he laughed it was all he was doing.

And she was made to fall in love with him again there in the rutted dirt driveway standing in the cold fog, mad as she was at his going away when he really didn't have to, mad at their both having got older in a life that seemed to have taken no more than a week to go by.

She was forty-nine at this time, a lanky woman of breeding with an austere, narrow face which had the distinction of a steeple or some architecture that had been designed long ago for a stubborn sort of prayer.

Her eyebrows were definite and heavy and formed two lines moving upward toward a high forehead and a great head of brown hair that fell to her shoulders.

There was an air of blindness in her gray eyes, the startled-horse look that ultimately comes to some women who are born at the end of an ancestral line long since divorced from money-making and which, besides, has kept its estate intact.

She was personally sloppy, and when she had colds would blow her nose in the same handkerchief all day and keep it, soaking wet, dangling from her waist, and when she gardened she would eat dinner with dirt on her calves.

But just when she seemed to have sunk into some depravity of peasanthood she would disappear and come down bathed, brushed, and taking breaths of air, and even with her broken nails her hands would come to rest on a table or a leaf with a thoughtless delicacy, a grace of history, so to speak, and for an instant one saw how ferociously proud she was and adamant on certain questions of personal value.

She even spoke differently when she was clean, and she was clean now for his departure and her voice clear and rather sharp.