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Show 45 Martha McAllister had laughed. "I'm nervous," she said. "Thank you for coming," Hunt had said. "I live in Winchester," she had said. "That's a drive!" "It is. It took me a while. I had to get the children off to school. And then, when I got here, it took a little while to find your street." "It's a little one - isn't it?" Hunt had smiled. "It is. --This is nice." "This?" "Yes." "Well - there's good light, and it's near the ocean. You can't have everything." "Sometimes you have \/ery little," Martha McAllister had said. "Well, let's . . ." Hunt had started to prepare a canvas, get paints out. "If you . . . if you feel self-conscious, why don't you undress behind that screen. I thought, maybe if you could sit in that wing chair. By the window. With the light coming in, you know, kind of through those Sandwich glass bottles -- it's kind of nice, it's kind of amber -- that would be a nice composition. Another leap. Another impulse, total act of stupidity, larger than his eggplant or his avocado. Just undress he had said to the stranger: Just undress and sit over there in that chair by the window. At the distant edge of the bay, Hunt could see the shelters of ice fishermen. And she had done it! Her eyes had gone white, and then yellow and then profoundly blue, but she had moved, as Hunt had suggested, off behind the |