She was used to confined spaces but when in open air could not help but walk in to walls and trip over herself and her capabilities. She spent a lot of time clotted in bruised corners making work in the middle of sleeping and humming and spying.
“Consider the following case: She has been taught a use of the words “lighter” and “darker” (a practical use she, in the end, uses to decipher which stones belonged where…). She’s been shown objects before of various colours and sizes and has been taught that one calls this a darker colour than that, trained to bring an object on being ordered “Bring something darker than this”, and to describe the colour of an object by saying that it is darker or lighter than a certain sample, etc., etc. Now she is given the order to put down a series of objects, arranging them in the order of their darkness and size. She does this by laying out rows of books, writing down a series of names of animals, and by writing down five vowels in the order u, o, a, e, i. We ask her why she put down that latter series, she says, “Well, o is lighter than u, and e lighter than o”. – We shall be astonished at this attitude, and at the same time admit that there is something in what she says. Perhaps we shall say: “But look, surely e isn’t lighter than o in the way this book is lighter than the page we happen to be upon”. But she may shrug her shoulders and say, “I don’t know, but e is lighter than o, isn’t it?””
“…in the path’s of our of our garden one finds beautifully coloured smooth shaped pebbles, varying in size from two to eight centimetres. She cannot resist picking up these unusual stones, and little by little builds up quite a collection of them, which lies on the window-cill of my workroom. Unconsciously I begin to sort these out by size, obeying a lifelong fascination with the sizes of things, equivalent to the interest painters have in the weight of colour in its darkness and shades of light. By rejecting those pebbles whose difference in size was too small to be perceptible, she reduced my collection to a series of thirty-six whose size-difference amounted to 4% of the size of the stones (in the stream). It at once became apparent, however, that if the pebbles were spread out at random, they could be seen to belong to clearly different groups. One could start by picking out the largest ones, until a point came when none were left that belonged to that size. A smaller group, again of a same type of size, then revealed itself. In this way the pebbles sorted themselves out in to five groups, each of six or seven stones which one assessed to be the same sort of size.”
