Now a woman approached the doorway, a woman wearing what looked like a uniform, but of no sort Roland had ever seen. It was bright red, and part of it was pants. He could see the place where her legs became her crotch. This was nothing he had ever seen on a woman who was not undressed. She came so close to the door that Roland thought she would walk through, and he blundered back a step, lucky not to fall. She looked at him with the practiced solicitude of a woman who is at once a servant and no one’s mistress but her own.
