She seemed, like an exhausted swimmer for whom the shore appears a long way away, to be scarcely able to rise above the waves of time that were submerging her. Gradually, though, by dint of studying her face, hesitant and uncertain like an unreliable memory which can no longer retain the shapes of earlier times, I finally managed to retrieve something of it by playing a little game of eliminating the squares and hexagons which age had added to her cheeks.
