nd, sweet
natured, clean, good. She could read his character in his face. But how
could this be, if he were responsible for so much evil? She shook her
head wearily. There was no explanation, no understanding of this world
which destroyed little babes and bruised women's breasts.

As for her having strayed into that neighborhood of fine residences,
she was unsurprised. It was in line with her queerness. She did so many
things without knowing that she did them. But she must be careful. It
was better to wander on the marshes and the Rock Wall.

Especially she liked the Rock Wall. There was a freedom about it, a wide
spaciousness that she found herself instinctively trying to breathe,
holding her arms out to embrace and make part of herself. It was a
more natural world, a more rational world. She could understand
it--understand the green crabs with white-bleached claws that scuttled
before her and which she could see pasturing on green-weeded rocks
when the tide was low. Here, hopelessly man-made as the great wall was,
nothing seemed artificial. There were no men here, no laws nor conflicts
of men. The tide flowed and ebbed; the sun rose and set; regularly each
afternoon the brave west wind came romping in through the Golden Gate,
darkening the water, cresting tiny wavelets, making the sailboats fly.
Everything ran with frictionless order. Everything was free. Firewood
lay about for the taking. No man sold it by the sack. Small boys fished
with poles from the rocks, with no one to drive them away for trespass,
catching fish as Billy had caught fish, as Cal Hutchins had caught fish.
Billy had told her of the great perch Cal Hutchins caught on the day of
the eclipse, when he had little dreamed the heart of his manhood would
be spent in convict's garb.

And here was food, food that was free. She watched the small boys on
a day when she had eaten nothing, and emulated them, gathering mussels
from the rocks at low water, cooking them by placing them among the
coals of a fire she built on top of the wall. They tasted particularly
good. She learned to knock the small oysters from the rocks, and once
she found a string of fresh-caught fish some small boy had forgotten to
take home with him.

Here drifted evidences of man's sinister handiwork--from a distance,
from the cities. One flood tide she found the water covered with
muskmelons. They bobbed and bumped along up the estuary in countless
thousands. Where they stranded again