She had the air of being disintegrated, like a mineral under an immense weight--quartz in a crushing mill; of being dulled and numbed as if she were under the influence of narcotics.
There is little enough wonder, if she actually carried that imponderable secret about with her.

I used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if she, too, saw the oncoming of the inevitable.

She was limited enough in her ideas, but not too stupid to take that in if it presented itself.
Indeed they have that sort of idea rather grimly before them all the time--that class.
It must have been that that was daily, and little by little, pressing down her eyelids and deepening the quivering lines of her impenetrable face.

She had a certain solitary grandeur, the pathos attaching to the last of a race, of a type; the air of waiting for the deluge, of listening for an inevitable sound--the sound of oncoming waters.
It was weird, the time that I spent in that house--more than weird--deadening.

It had an extraordinary effect on me--an effect that my "sister," perhaps, had carefully calculated.