He says you may come in any morning you like.' "Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours.
Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls them.

She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking.

She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her personal appearance.

She told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her personal existence.

She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping.