Barren Ground quotes

A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road.

Though she watched there without moving, her attitude, in its stillness, gave an impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life.

Bare, starved, desolate, the country closed in about her. The last train of the day had gone by without stopping, and the station of Pedlar's Mill was as lonely as the abandoned fields by the track.

During the long spring rains, a film of yellow-green stole over the burned ground. At autumn sunsets, when the red light searched the country, the broomsedge caught fire from the afterglow and blazed out in a splendour of colour.

Then the meeting of earth and sky dissolved in the flaming mist of the horizon.

At these quiet seasons, the dwellers near Pedlar's Mill felt scarcely more than a tremor on the surface of life.

And while the wind bewitched the solitude, a vague restlessness would stir in the hearts of living things on the farms, of men, women, and animals.

"Broomsage ain't jest wild stuff. It's a kind of fate," old Matthew Fairlamb used to say.

Thirty years ago, modern methods of farming, even methods that were modern in the benighted eighteen-nineties, had not penetrated to this thinly settled part of Virginia.

The good families of the state have preserved, among other things, custom, history, tradition, romantic fiction, and the Episcopal Church.

The good people, according to the records of clergymen, which are the only surviving records, have preserved nothing except themselves.

Ignored alike by history and fiction, they have their inconspicuous place in the social strata midway between the lower gentility and the upper class of "poor white," a position which encourages the useful rather than the ornamental public virtues.

Then the stranger who was not a stranger would say, "I knew your face among a thousand, and I came back to find you." And the train would rush on with them into the something different beyond the misty edge of the horizon.

Adventure, happiness, even unhappiness, if it were only different!

That was yesterday. To-day the miracle had occurred, and the whole of life had blossomed out like a flower in the sun.

Until to-day the passing trains had been a part of that expected miracle, the something different in the future, to which she looked ahead over the tedious stretch of the present. There was glamour for her in the receding smoke.

There was adventure in the silver-blue of the distance.

The glimpse of a rapidly disappearing face; a glance from strange eyes that she remembered; the shadowy outline of a gesture; these tenuous impressions ran like vivid threads in her memory.

Though she was drowning in bliss, she could only gaze at him stupidly.

Why did love, when it came, take away all your ability to enjoy it?

"I didn't know you were coming back so soon," she said after a struggle.

Rufus picked up a fishing pole and resumed his whittling. Until bedtime the three men would sprawl there in the agreeable warmth between the fireplace and the lamp on the table.

Nobody talked; conversation was as alien to them as music.

Drugged with fatigue, they nodded in a vegetable somnolence. Even in their hours of freedom they could not escape the relentless tyranny of the soil.

Until bedtime the three men would sprawl there in the agreeable warmth between the fireplace and the lamp on the table. Nobody talked; conversation was as alien to them as music. Drugged with fatigue, they nodded in a vegetable somnolence.

Even in their hours of freedom they could not escape the relentless tyranny of the soil.

After putting away the Bible, Mrs. Oakley took out a dozen damask towels, with Turkey red borders and fringed ends, from her top bureau drawer and began to look over then.

The day had begun. It was like every other day in the past. It would be like every other day in the future.

Suddenly the feeling came over her that she was caught like a mouse in the trap of life.

No matter how desperately she struggled, she could never escape; she could never be free. She was held fast by circumstances as by invisible wires of steel.

It would be like every other day in the future. Suddenly the feeling came over her that she was caught like a mouse in the trap of life. No matter how desperately she struggled, she could never escape; she could never be free.

She was held fast by circumstances as by invisible wires of steel.

Several hours later, when she started to the store, the trapped sensation vanished, and the gallant youth within her lifted its head. There was moisture that did not fall in the air.

The landscape, which had worn a discouraged aspect, appeared suddenly to glow under the surface. Veins of green and gold, like tiny rivulets of spring, glistened in the winter woods and in the mauve and brown of the fields.

The world was familiar, and yet, in some indescribable way, it was different, shot through with romance as with the glimmer of phosphorescence.

Life, which had drooped, flared up again, burning clear and strong in Dorinda's heart. It had come back, that luminous expectancy, that golden mist of sensation. "Don't forget me. I shall see you soon," repeated an inner voice;

For an instant Dorinda held her breath while a wave of dull sickness swept over her. At that moment she realized that the innocence of her girlhood, the ingenuous belief that love brought happiness, had departed for ever.

She was in the thick of life, and the thick of life meant not peace but a sword in the heart.

Though she scarcely knew Geneva Ellgood, she felt that they were enemies. It was not fair, she told herself passionately, that one girl should have everything and one nothing!

A primitive impulse struggled like some fierce invader in her mind, among the orderly instincts and inherited habits of thought. She was startled; she was frightened; but she was defiant.

In a flash the knowledge came to her that habit and duty and respectability are not the whole of life.

Beyond the beaten road in which her ideas and inclinations had moved, she had discovered a virgin wilderness of mystery and terror.

Since the girl was determined to waste her money, it would be a pity, Miss Seena reflected gently, to spoil the pleasure of her improvidence.

After all, you weren't young and good-looking but such a little while!

"I'll do the best I can, honey," she said briskly. "And they'll charge it to me at Brandywine and Plummer's store, so you don't need to bring the money till the first of the month.

Only a week ago his attention would have flattered her, but to-day she had other things to think of, and his admiring oxlike stare made her impatient.

Was that the way things always came, after you had stopped wanting them?

"Well, he ought to have a good crop after the work he's put on those fields," he continued, as she placed the packages in a cracker box and handed them to him over the counter.

"That's what Father says." He accepted the fatalistic philosophy without dispute. "

After all, the rain and frost and drought, not the farmer, do most of the farming.

" He had had a good education, and though his speech was more provincial than Jason's, it lacked entirely the racy flavour of Pedlar's Mill.

In those first months after his return to Pedlar's Mill, he possessed for her the charm of distant countries and picturesque enterprises. It was the flavour of personality, she realized, even then, not of experience.

He had travelled little, yet his presence diffused the perilous thrill of adventure.

"This is Dorinda," Rose Emily said; and he looked up and nodded as casually as if he had never seen her before, or had just parted from her. Which impression, Dorinda wondered, did he mean to convey?

"Repentance! Good Lord!

What opportunity has she ever had to commit a pleasure?

"

"Only that he wanted to have you up before summer."

After all, the big lie was easier than the little one.

Mrs. Pedlar sighed happily. "I do wish summer would come!"

Dorinda bent down and straightened the pillow under the brilliant head.

It was hard to die, she thought, when the world was so beautiful.

There could be no drearier lot, she imagined, than marriage with Nathan for a husband; better by far the drab freedom of the Snead sisters. Yet even to Rose Emily, married to Nathan, life was not without sweetness.

He always gets his way with me. He's thwarted everything I ever wanted to do as far back as I can remember. For my good of course. I understand that.

But you can ruin people's lives—especially young people's lives— from the best motives.

"

In this dream, as in a remembered one of her childhood, she was for ever approaching some magical occasion, and yet never quite reaching it.

She was for ever about to be satisfied, and yet never satisfied in the end.

The dream, like all her dreams, carried her so far and no farther. At the very point where she needed it most, it broke off and left her suspended in a world of gossamer unrealities.

She had expected nothing, and yet because nothing had come, she was dissatisfied and unhappy. Was there no rest anywhere? she asked without knowing that she asked it.

Was love, like life, merely a passing from shock to shock, with no permanent peace?

Returning from church, the family had sat down, ill-humoured from emptiness, to dinner at four o'clock. It was the custom to have dinner in the middle of the afternoon, and no supper on Sunday;

The windows were seldom opened; but Dorinda had just flung back the shutters, and the view she gazed out upon was like the coming of spring in an old tapestry.

Though the land was not beautiful, that also had its moments of beauty.

Immediately in front of her, the pear orchard had flowered a little late and scattered its frail bloom on the grass.

To her direct, forward-springing nature there was a shock in the discovery that, where the matter is one of love, honesty is at best a questionable policy.

Was truth, after all, in spite of the exhortations of preachers, a weaker power than duplicity?

Would evasion win in life where frankness would fail? Then, as passion burned through her like the sunrise, doubt was extinguished. Since her heart told her that he was securely hers, what did it matter to her how she had won him?

"It can't last much longer," she said. Was it the right thing, she wondered, or ought she to have kept up the pretence of loving the old man and dreading his death?

Life would be so much simpler, she reflected, if people would only build on facts, not on shams.

He shook his head. "Nobody can say. Sometimes I think he can't last but a few weeks. Then he improves, without apparent reason, and his strength is amazing. According to everything we know about his condition, he ought to have died months ago;

I may be all wrong. Sometimes I know that I am. But, after all, it was a good impulse that made me promise to stick to him." For an instant he hesitated, and then added bitterly, "

I can't tell you how often in life I've seen men betrayed by their good impulses.

"

Do you remember the time I put up notices and opened the schoolhouse, and got only Nathan Pedlar and an idiot boy for an audience?

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of it.

Well, that was almost six months ago, and those six months have taught me that any prejudice, even the prejudice in favour of the one-crop system, is a sacred institution. Look at the land!"

In the fields the summer flowers were dry and brittle, and over the moist places near the spring, clusters of pale blue butterflies, as fragile as flower petals, hung motionless.

Only the broomsedge thrived in the furnace of the earth, and sprang up in a running fire over the waste places.

As she went by the tobacco field, her father stopped work, for a moment, and stooped to take a drink of water from the wooden bucket which stood at the end of the furrow.

"I'll have to hang a piece of mosquito netting over these apples," she said. "There's some we used for curtains in the spare room. Well, I told you I'd kind of set my heart on your father," she added in a lifeless tone. "

But there's one thing I can tell you, daughter, mighty few folks in this world ever get what they want.

"

Far beyond him, where a field had been abandoned because it contained a gall, where nothing would grow, she could just discern the scalloped reaches of the broomsedge, rippling, in the lilac-coloured distance, like still water at sunset. Yes, old Matthew was right.

What the broomsedge caught, it never relinquished.

Lifting the wooden bucket from the shelf on the back porch, she poured the stale water over a thin border of portulaca by the steps, and started at a run for the well.

"Is that so?" He appeared genuinely surprised. "I never calculated!

The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.

"

Then, as she lifted the bar and passed through the gate, she felt that the solitude, which had always possessed a mysterious sympathy with her moods, reached out and received her into itself.

Like a beneficent tide, the loneliness washed over her, smoothing out, as it receded, the vague apprehensions that had ruffled her thoughts.

The austere horizon, flat and impenetrable beneath the threatening look of the sky; the brown and yellow splashes of woods in the October landscape; the furtive windings and recoils of the sunken road;

For a while this stillness was so intense that she felt as if it were palpitating in smothered throbs like her heart.

The storm was gathering on another planet.

So remote it was that the slow reverberations were echoed across an immensity of silence. The first mile was past. Then the second.

She would have moonlight in the woods, and besides she had nothing to fear. A dry sob broke from her, hurting her throat.

You had reached the worst, she realized, when you had nothing to fear.

She followed the path rapidly. By the pear orchard, by the big pine on the hill, by the tobacco field, through the pasture, and into the dark belt of woods.

Then, even if you are sure, it pays to be prudent. Prudence builds no poorhouses—that was her mother again. Oh, if only she had known when knowledge could have been useful!

If only you could live your life after experience and not before!

She knew now how to face things. . . .

Then, in a single flash, just as it had returned at the store, all the horror rushed over her afresh, and she turned away and ran out of the room.

Any spot, she realized, was more endurable than the place she was in.

"You ain't going back already, Dorinda?" called her mother from the kitchen.

And she felt that in a little while this essential self would reassert its power and triumph over disaster. Vague, transitory, comforting, this premonition brooded above the wilderness of her thoughts.

Yes, she was not broken. She could never be broken while the vein of iron held in her soul.

For a long while she sat there by the roadside, with her eyes on the pale sunshine and the transparent shadows. What would her mother say if she knew? When would she know? Who would have the courage to tell her?

For a long while she sat there by the roadside, with her eyes on the pale sunshine and the transparent shadows. What would her mother say if she knew? When would she know? Who would have the courage to tell her?

For twenty years they had lived in the house together, yet they were still strangers.

For twenty years they had not spent a night apart, and all the time her mother had dreamed of coral strands and palm trees, while she herself had grown into a thing as strange and far away as Africa.

For twenty years they had not spent a night apart, and all the time her mother had dreamed of coral strands and palm trees, while she herself had grown into a thing as strange and far away as Africa.

Were people like this everywhere, all over the world, each one a universe in one's self separate like the stars in a vast emptiness?

Far over the autumn fields, she heard the whistle of the train as it rounded the long curve at the station. Before the sound had floated past her she had come to one of those impetuous decisions which were characteristic of her temperament.

and now that imagination had done its worst, she set herself to the task of rebuilding her ruined world. All her trouble, she felt, had come to her from trying to make life over into something it was not.

Dreams, that was the danger.

Like her mother she had tried to find a door in the wall, an escape from the tyranny of things as they are; and like her mother, she had floundered among visions. Even though she was miserable now, her misery was solid ground;

Dreams, that was the danger. Like her mother she had tried to find a door in the wall, an escape from the tyranny of things as they are; and like her mother, she had floundered among visions.

Even though she was miserable now, her misery was solid ground; her feet were firmly planted among the ancient rocks of experience.

She had finished with romance, as she had finished with Jason, for ever.

Dimly she felt that she was meeting life, at this moment, on its own terms, stripped of illusion, stripped even of idealism, except the idealism she could wring from the solid facts of experience.

The blow that had shattered her dreams had let in the cloudless flood of reality.

"You can't change the past by thinking," she told herself stubbornly, "but there must be something ahead. There must be something in life besides love."

The blow that had shattered her dreams had let in the cloudless flood of reality. "You can't change the past by thinking," she told herself stubbornly, "but there must be something ahead.

There must be something in life besides love.

"

"You'd better get used to smells before you try to make a living in the city," she had said disagreeably. The advice was sound, as Dorinda knew, and she had no just cause for resentment.

Yet there were moments when it seemed to her that New York would live in her recollection not as a place but as an odour.

All day she walked from one stony street to another, stopping to rest now and then on a bench in one of the squares, where she would sit motionless for hours, watching the sparrows.

After this several men had followed Dorinda on different occasions. "Do I look like that kind?" she had asked herself bitterly. But in each separate instance, when she glanced round at her pursuer, he had vanished.

In a city where joy may be had for a price, there are few who turn and follow the footsteps of tragedy.

Yes, she could take care of herself. Poverty might prove to be a match for her strength, but as far as men were concerned, she decided that she had taken their measure and was no longer afraid of them.

Her self-confidence returned when she found how easy it was to pursue her individual life, to retain her secret identity, in the midst of the city.

She discovered presently that when nothing matters the problem of existence becomes amazingly simple.

Fear, which had been perversely associated with happiness, faded from her mind when despair entered it. From several unpleasant episodes she had learned to be on the watch and to repulse advances that were disagreeable;

Her self-confidence returned when she found how easy it was to pursue her individual life, to retain her secret identity, in the midst of the city. She discovered presently that when nothing matters the problem of existence becomes amazingly simple.

Fear, which had been perversely associated with happiness, faded from her mind when despair entered it.

From several unpleasant episodes she had learned to be on the watch and to repulse advances that were disagreeable; but at such moments her courage proved to be as vast as her wretchedness.

If only she might take off her shoes, she thought, she could begin to be comfortable. At Pedlar's Mill tea was not used except in illness or bereavement, and she was not prepared for the immediate consolation it afforded her.

Strange that a single cup of tea and a buttered muffin from a bakery should revive her courage!

After all, the city wasn't so stony and inhospitable as she had believed. People were friendly here, if you found the right ones, just as they were in the country. They liked cats too.

Closing her eyes again, she lay without thinking, without stirring, without feeling, while she let life cover her slowly in a warm flood.

The blessed relief was that nothing mattered; nothing that had happened or could ever happen mattered at all.

After the months when she had cared so intensely, it was like the peace of the Sabbath not to care any longer, neither to worry nor to wonder about the future.

"I've got my purse under my pillow." As Dorinda drew out the little leather bag, and slipped the card into it, she thought wearily, "How funny it is that this should have happened to me."

Since her illness, the whole of life, all she had gone through, all she saw around her, all feeling everywhere, appeared less tragic than ludicrous.

Though her capacity for emotion was dead, some diabolical sense of humour had sprung up like, fireweed from the ruins. She could laugh at everything now, but it was ironic laughter.

Since her illness, the whole of life, all she had gone through, all she saw around her, all feeling everywhere, appeared less tragic than ludicrous.

Though her capacity for emotion was dead, some diabolical sense of humour had sprung up like, fireweed from the ruins.

She could laugh at everything now, but it was ironic laughter.

A high wind was blowing from the west, billowing the sleeves and skirts of women's dresses, whipping the dust into waves, and tossing the gay streamers in Fifth Avenue.

The sunlight appeared to splinter as it struck against the crystal blue of the sky and to scatter a shower of sparkling drops on the city.

Though it was all bright, gay, beautiful, to Dorinda the scene might have been made of glass in the windy hollow of the universe.

The hardest thing, she knew, that she had to face was not the wreck of her happiness, but the loss of a vital interest in life.

Even people who were unhappy retained sometimes sufficient interest in the mere husk of experience to make life not only endurable but even diverting.

With her, however, she felt that she had nothing to expect and nothing to lose.

She laughed with the perverse humour that she had brought back out of the depths of unconsciousness.

If only one could get outside of it and stand a little way off, how ridiculous almost any situation in life would appear!

Even those moments when she had waited in anguish at the fork of the road were tinged with irony when they revived now in her memory. "All the same I wouldn't go through them again for anything that life could offer," she thought.

Young as she was she had acquired the ripe wisdom and the serene self-confidence of maturity; she had attained the immunity from apprehension which comes to those only who can never endure the worst again. Yet she was not unhappy.

In the security of her disenchantment there was the quiet that follows a storm.

While she waited there for the sound of the doctor's bell, she thought dispassionately of what the last two years had meant in her life. Everything and nothing!

With a complete absence of self-deception, she could ask herself now if she had been in love with love when she met Jason Greylock, and if any other reasonably attractive man would have answered as well in his place.

Was it the moment, after all, and not the man, that really mattered?

If Bob Ellgood had shown that admiring interest in her the year before instead of the day after she met Jason, would her life have been different?

Richard Burch was not ugly; he was even attractive looking after you got used to his features. He had a short, rather stocky figure, and a square, not uninteresting face, a good face, Mrs. Faraday called it.

Almost any girl who had the will to love might have argued herself into loving him.

That emotion was, in part at least, the result of a will to love, Dorinda had learned in the last two years, since she had picked up more or less of the patter of science;

"Oh, I don't mind. People say we make our mouths. I heard Doctor Faraday tell a woman that a few days ago. But it isn't true.

Life makes us and breaks us. We don't make life.

The best we can do is to bear it."

With the flight of wings, ecstasy quivered over her, while sound and colour were transformed into rhythms of feeling. Pure sensation held and tortured her.

She felt the music playing on her nerves as the wind plays on a harp; she felt it shatter her nerves like broken string, and sweep on crashing, ploughing through the labyrinth of her soul.

Down there, in the deep below the depths of her being, she felt it tearing her vitals. Down there, in the buried jungle, where her thoughts had never penetrated, she felt it destroying the hidden roots of her life.

She shook her head. "

We have the experience of generations, and it has taught us nothing except to do things the way we've always done them.

Mother used to say that the only land she would ever cultivate, if she had to choose over again, is the land of Canaan where

"I mean I can't stay away any longer. I'm part of it.

I belong to the abandoned fields.

"

Then she lifted the folds of her skirt as the conductor, who was firmly planted now on the earth, helped her to alight. Her heart was sad for her father, but beneath the sadness her indomitable pride supported her. Yes, she had come back unashamed.

She might not return as a conqueror, but she had returned undefeated.

They were looking at her as she stepped to the ground, and she felt, with a thrill of satisfaction, that, in her navy blue poplin with the chiffon veil framing her face (hanging veils were much worn in New York that year) she was worthy …

"Nothing has changed," Dorinda thought. "

Nothing has changed but myself.

"

Rising from her chair, she stood looking down on him with misty eyes.

After all, the pathos of life was worse than the tragedy.

"Is the light too strong?" she asked, as she turned away. "Shall I close one of the shutters?"

She knew that the place was more to her than soil to be cultivated; that it was the birthplace and burial ground of hopes, desires, and disappointments.

The old feeling that the land thought and felt, that it possessed a secret personal life of its own, brushed her mood as it sped lightly by.

"All this and just waste, waste, waste," she said slowly.

"What a fancy you've got," Nathan answered admiringly, "and always had even when you were a child. But you're right about endurance.

This farm looks to me as if it had endured about as much as it can stand.

"

Yet, deprived of that advantage, and left to flounder on without intelligent guidance, he had become, Dorinda admitted thoughtfully, more likable than ever.

For the first time it occurred to her that a marriage too much above one may become as great an obstacle as a marriage too much below one.

"How big is Green Acres?" she asked, keenly interested.

"Well, I'll help you," he promised, "all' I can.

I've learned a little by failing. That's as much as most farmers can say.

" When he dropped the personal tone and began to talk of the things he knew, there was a rustic dignity in his ugliness. After all, she could depend on him, and that meant a good deal to her as a farmer.

Half of her mind was here, watching the meadow-larks skimming over the fields, and the other half crouched under the dripping boughs by the fork of the road. Only the imaginary half seemed more real, more physical even, than the actual one.

Not her mind, she felt with horror, but her senses, her nerves, and the very corpuscles of her blood, remembered the agony.

"I think I'll go back," she said, turning quickly. "Ma might want me to help her."

Weakness doesn't help anything." For an instant this thought held her; then it occurred to her that, in the years to come, she would be continually tired; and that, tired or not, she must fight against weakness. "

I've got to go straight ahead, no matter how I feel.

"

The sun had just risen, and there was a sparkling freshness over the earth and in the luminous globe of the sky. She had slept well, and with the morning weakness had vanished.

The wild part of her had perished like burned grass; out of nothing, into nothing, that was the way of it.

Now, armoured in reason, she was ready to meet life on its own terms.

She had slept well, and with the morning weakness had vanished. The wild part of her had perished like burned grass; out of nothing, into nothing, that was the way of it.

Now, armoured in reason, she was ready to meet life on its own terms.

"Do you know where Rufus is?" she asked. "I want him to see the hands start work in the eighteen-acre field."

All that takes money, of course," he continued, with depressing accuracy, "but it is the only way to make anything out of a farm.

Father says there ain't but one way to learn to do anything, and that's the right way.

"

They don't know you. They don't even wish to know you. They are interested in nothing on earth but their own reactions." And she remembered suddenly that Jason had once generalized like this about women, and that she was merely copying what he had said.

How stupid generalizations were, and how deceptive!

"I hope you'll make a success of it," Bob said. "I like women who take hold of things and aren't afraid of work when they have to do it. That's the right spirit."

"

Oh, I don't mind work. What else is there in life?

"

Why, above all, should Nature move so unintelligently in the matter of instinct? Did this circle of reasoning lead back inevitably, she wondered, to the steadfast doctrine of original sin? "

The truth is we always want what is bad for us, I suppose

," she concluded, and gave up the riddle.

and in these blind instincts of her being there were even now occasional flashes of longing. While she was awake she could escape him; but at night, when she slept, she would live over again all the happiest hours she had spent with him.

Never the pain, never the cruelty of the past; only the beauty and the unforgettable ecstasy came back to her in her dreams.

As she drove out of the woods the sun was sinking beyond the cleft of the road, and a slow procession of shadows was moving across the broomsedge, where little waves of light quivered and disappeared and quivered again like ripples in running water.

With her drooping energy, weariness had crept over her; but out of weariness, she passed presently, like the country, into a mood of endurance. She realized, without despair, that the general aspect of her life would be one of unbroken monotony.

Enthusiasm would not last. Energy would not last.

Cheerfulness, buoyancy, interest, not one of these qualities would last as long as she needed it. Nothing would last through to the end except courage.

She realized, without despair, that the general aspect of her life would be one of unbroken monotony. Enthusiasm would not last. Energy would not last. Cheerfulness, buoyancy, interest, not one of these qualities would last as long as she needed it.

Nothing would last through to the end except courage.

Her gaze was on the horizon. The reins, tied together with a bit of rope, were held loosely in her hands. With every turn of the wheel, a shower of dried mud was scattered over her clothes.

When the trembling had passed, she stooped and picked up the reins. "It will be easier next time," she said, and a moment later, "I suppose I've got to get used to it.

You can get used to anything if you have to.

" A dull misery stupefied her thoughts, and she was without clear perception of what the meeting had meant to her. "I can't understand why I suffer so," she pondered. "I can't understand how a person you despise can make you so unhappy."

"They might, but it's easier for me to wear overalls than to break them.

You can't farm in skirts anyway.

"

"If you choose to kill yourself, I don't see how I can prevent it." Dorinda's voice wavered with exasperation. If only her mother would listen to reason, she felt, both of their lives would be so much easier.

But did mothers ever listen to reason?

"I'm going to walk up to Poplar Spring and look at the woods you wrote me about," she added. "I hope we shan't have to sell them and put the money into the land."

a look which was austere, inaccessible, with a reproachful wonder beneath its mask of solemnity, as if he were still asking life why it had crushed him. "Whatever I give, the farm will be always mine," she thought. "That was the way he felt.

The farm isn't human and it won't make you suffer. Only human things break your heart.

" Everything appeared so simple when she regarded it through the film of sentiment that obscured her judgment. Kinship with the land was filtered through her blood into her brain; and she knew that this transfigured instinct was blended of pity, memory, and passion.

Her smile was exultant. "Yes, I am hard.

I'm through with soft things.

"

"I'm made that way. I can't help it.

If I didn't live in the future, I couldn't stand things as they are.

"

Her love was dead; and her regret clung less to the thought that love had ended in disappointment than to the supreme tragedy that love ended at all.

Nothing endured. Everything perished of its own inner decay.

That, after all, was the gnawing worm at the heart of experience. If either her love or her hatred had lasted, she would have found less bitterness in the savour of life.

Never, since she had looked into his face and had told herself that she was indifferent, had she known complete disillusionment. The trouble was, she discovered, that instead of remembering him as she had last seen him, her imagination created images which her reason denied.

Not only her pain, but the very memory of pain that had once been, could leave, she found, a physical soreness.

Beyond the fields and the road the sun was sinking lower, and the western sky was stained with the colour of autumn fruits. While she watched the clouds, Dorinda remembered the heart of a pomegranate that she had seen in a window in New York;

Something dark and cold had settled over her thoughts. She could not shake it off though she told herself that it was unreasonable for her to feel so despondent.

As if despondency, she added, were the product of reason!

Mother love was a wonderful thing, she reflected, a wonderful and a ruinous thing!

Some women would have gone on loving Jason no matter how he treated them; but I'm not made that way. There's something deep down in me that I value more than love or happiness or anything outside myself.

It may be only pride, but it comes first of all.

"

"Don't you worry. I'll put you to bed." As she turned down the bed and smoothed out the coarse sheets and the patchwork quilt, it seemed to Dorinda that the inanimate objects in the room had borrowed pathos from their human companions.

All the stitches that had gone into this quilt, happy stitches, sad stitches, stitches that had ended in nothing!

Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked quickly away. What was it in houses and furniture that made them come to life in hours of suspense and tear at the heartstrings?

"He'll be more likely to help you if you get some sleep and stop worrying.

The Lord helps good sleepers.

" Though she spoke flippantly, she was frightened by the look in her mother's face.

"No, I like a little light.

You can see so many things in the dark after the fire goes out.

"

"I don't know," Dorinda rejoined briskly. "Fluvanna and Nimrod will have to manage the best they can. I'm not going to worry about it.

People can always be spared easier than they think they can.

"

"You're right thar, honey.

Put yo' heart in the land. The land is the only thing that will stay by you.

"

Far away, in the direction of Old Farm, the shocked corn on the hill was swimming in a rain of apricot-coloured lights. "If only it would last," she thought, "things would not be so hard to bear. But it is like happiness.

Before you know that you have found it, it goes.

"

Old Matthew's cheeks were as red as winter apples, and his eyes twinkled like black haws in their sockets. "

He! He! When thar ain't nothin' to hurt, we've no need to worry!

"

A hot anger against Rufus flamed in her heart. Then she saw that the boy was shaking with emotion, and her anger was smothered in pity. After all, who was to blame?

Who was ever to blame in life?

"It's all right, Dorinda," Nathan said, as he helped Mrs. Oakley to the ground and up on the porch. "Your Ma held up splendidly, but it's been too much for her. She's worn clean out, I reckon."

Would she never again become living and human? The old sense of the hollowness of reality had revived. Though she knew it was her mother of whom they had been speaking, the words awoke only echoes in her thoughts.

She longed with all her soul to suffer acutely; yet she could feel nothing within this colourless void in which she was imprisoned.

When the buggy had disappeared, she retraced her steps to the house and entered her mother's room with a smile on her lips.

Her old tropical dream came back to her; in her sleep she would ramble on about palm trees and crocodiles and ebony babies. "I declare, it seems just as if I'd been there," she said one morning. "

It's queer how much more real dreams can be than the things you're going through.

"

For an instant, the permanence of material things, the inexorable triumph of fact over emotion, appeared to be the only reality. These things had been ageless when her mother was young; they would be still ageless when she herself had become an old woman.

Over the immutable landscape human lives drifted and vanished like shadows.

When she looked back on the years that followed her mother's death, Dorinda could remember nothing but work. Out of a fog of recollection there protruded bare outlines which she recognized as the milestones of her prosperity.

All the cold starry mornings when she had awakened before day and crept out to the barn by lantern light to attend to the milking, appeared to her now as a solitary frozen dawn.

All the bleak winters, all the scorching summers, were a single day; all the evenings, when she had dreamed half asleep in the firelit dusk, were a single night.

She could not separate these years into seasons. In her long retrospect they were crystallized into one flawless pattern.

"The truth is, I would rather have failed at the start than have gone on like that," she thought. "

I was able to take risks because I was too unhappy to be afraid.

" Yes, she had had the courage of desperation, and that had saved her from failure. Without borrowed money, without the courage to borrow money, she could never have made the farm even a moderate success.

This had required not only perseverance but audacity as well; and it had required audacity again to permeate the methodical science of farming with the spirit of adventure.

Interest, excitement even, must be instilled into the heartless routine.

The hours of work never varied. Chores were done by necessity, as in the old days without system, but by the stroke of the clock. Each milker had her own place, and milked always the same cows.

Dorinda would shake her head thoughtfully. "

Not if they are my cows and chickens.

"

In this reply, which was as invariable as a formula, she touched unerringly the keynote of her character. The farm belonged to her, and the knowledge aroused a fierce sense of possession.

To protect, to lift up, rebuild and restore, these impulses formed the deepest obligation her nature could feel.

Though she talked frankly to Nathan about the farm and the debts which had once encumbered it, she had never given him her confidence as generously as she had bestowed it on Fluvanna.

Not love again! No, never again the love that she had known! What she longed for was the something different, the something indestructibly desirable and satisfying. Then there would return the blind sense of a purpose in existence which had evaded her search.

The encompassing dullness would melt like a cloud, and she would grasp a meaning beneath the deceptions and the cruelties of the past.

But this feeling was as fugitive as all others, and when it vanished it left not the glorified horizon, but simply the long day's work to be done.

Well, she would never become like that if she could prevent it.

She would never let disappointment eat away the heart in her bosom.

She was still handsome. The grave oval of her face, the fine austerity of its modelling, would remain noble even after she became an old woman and the warm colour of the flesh was mottled and stained with yellow.

She pointed to a picture which seemed to Dorinda to be the extreme of fashion. "Them box pleats and pointed basques is the latest thing. I reckon you'll have to get a new corset," she concluded sharply, looking the girl up and down. "

These styles don't set well unless they're worn over a straight font.

"

For a few minutes Dorinda was silent. When she spoke it was to remark irrelevantly, "

How little human beings know what is best for them.

"

"

He'd lost the wish, I reckon. Things happen like that sometimes.

The old man hung on to him until all the sap was drained dry."

"It must be going on nine years or so." He stopped to calculate as he did when he was adding up an account in the store. "

Well, I reckon he'd used up all his energy in wishing to get away. When the chance came, he didn't have enough spirit left to take advantage' of it.

" He sighed. "I've seen that happen I can't tell you how many times."

He was ridiculous; he was uncouth; he was the last man on earth, she told herself firmly, who could ever have inspired her with the shadow of sentiment.

Only after she had speculated upon these decisive objections did she begin to realize that absence of emotion was the only appeal any marriage could make to her.

Her nerves or her senses would have revolted from the first hint of passion. The only marriage she could tolerate, she reflected grimly, was one which attempted no swift excursions into emotion, no flights beyond the logical barriers of the three dimensions.

A few hours afterwards, while she walked slowly up the aisle in church, she felt rather than saw that the congregation, forgetting to stand up to sing, sat motionless and stared at her from the pews.

For the first time in her life she tasted the intoxicating flavour of power.

On the farm, success was translated into well-tilled acres or golden pounds of butter; but here, with these astonished eyes on her, she discovered that it contained a quality more satisfying than any material fact.

He shook his head, flinching as if from the cut of a whip. "Not with the other boys. I'd rather stay in the country with Father and you and the animals." His sympathetic understanding of animals was one of the strongest bonds between them.

From his birth he had known what it was to suffer and endure.

"I hoped that the new kind of shoe would make it easier for you," she said presently. "Is it comfortable?"

True, it was the one abundant meal of the week; but while she sat at the head of her table listening to the chatter of happy children, Dorinda remembered the frugal Sunday dinners of her mother and father, and her eyes smarted with tears.

That, she had learned, was the hidden sting of success; it rubbed old sores with the salt of regret until they were raw again.

In the hall, after dinner, while Dorinda was fastening a worn blue cape over her satin dress, Nathan stood gazing thoughtfully up the staircase.

We always remember that other people went without them. I've got the carpets now that Rose Emily wanted." After all, no one but Nathan had ever really understood her. With the thought she asked herself incredulously if understanding had anything whatever to do with love?

Did people who loved ever understand? Wasn't the misunderstanding even a part of love's divine madness?

"Yes, I ought to have done it long ago," she murmured inattentively.

Sex emotion, she repeated grimly, was as dead as a burned-out cinder in her heart. But respect she could still feel, and a marriage founded upon respect and expediency might offer an available refuge from loneliness.

As she grew older, the thing she feared most was not death, not poverty even, but the lonely fireside.

She walked on, disheartened by indecision, and Nathan was obliged to repeat his question twice before she heard what he was saying.

A different wedding day from the one of which she had dreamed long ago! But then, as she had learned through hard experience, imagination is a creative principle and depends little upon the raw material of life.

Nothing, she supposed, ever happened exactly as you hoped that it would.

Supper was a dreary affair. The children were restless and awkward, and even the wedding cake, which Fluvanna had baked in secret, and over which she had lamented with Nimrod, was lumpy and heavy.

Nathan laughed good-humouredly. "I might as well help you.

Dairy work is the sort that won't keep.

"

"I don't want you. There's plenty of work for you in the fields, but I don't want you meddling in my dairy."

For the first time she understood what work had meant in her mother's life; the flight of the mind from thought into action.

To have Nathan hanging round her in the dairy was the last thing, she said to herself, that she had anticipated in marriage.

His features wore the defenseless look which sleep brings to men and women alike, and she felt, with a pang of sympathy, that he was at her mercy because he cared while she was indifferent.

She would be always, she realized, the stronger of the two; for it seemed to her one of the inconsistencies of human nature that strength should be measured by indifference rather than by love.

Picking up the old grey blanket from the foot of the bed, she spread it over him so gently that he did not stir in his sleep. The honesty she had felt in him from the beginning was the single attribute that survived in unconsciousness.

She had long ago ceased to worry over wrinkles. Though she clung to youth, it was youth of the arteries and the spirit.

Her happiness was independent, she felt, of the admiration of men, and her value as a human being was founded upon a durable, if an intangible, basis.

Since she had proved that she could farm as well as a man there was less need for her to endeavour to fascinate as a woman.

She held the reins of her life too firmly grasped ever to relinquish them to another; and as she had foreseen on her wedding night, she possessed an incalculable advantage in merely liking Nathan while he loved her.

On her side at least marriage had begun where it so often ends happily, in charity of mind.

Though she could not love, she had chosen the best substitute for love, which is tolerance.

and as she had foreseen on her wedding night, she possessed an incalculable advantage in merely liking Nathan while he loved her. On her side at least marriage had begun where it so often ends happily, in charity of mind.

Though she could not love, she had chosen the best substitute for love, which is tolerance.

After five years of marriage, Nathan was scarcely more than a superior hired man on the farm. Dorinda still smiled at his jokes; she still considered his appetite; she still spoke of him respectfully to the children as "your father";

He had been a comfort to her ever since he had come to the farm; and yet, in spite of John Abner and the knowledge that she had married from fear of a solitary old age, she realized that she was still lonely.

Evidently, whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation of spirit.

As Nathan reached the porch he fumbled in the pocket of his overalls and drew out a greasy paper.

Yes, it was true, he had always hated it.

Through his whole life he had been tied by his own nature to the thing that he hated.

When the tenth of August came, Dorinda put on her best dress, a navy blue and white foulard which Leona Prince, the new dressmaker, had cut after the fashionable "Princesse style."

All through the drive something invisible was whipping her on, as if the memory of wet branches stung her face in the blue August weather.

A question was beating unanswered at the back of her brain.

Why, since she neither loved nor hated Jason, should she long so passionately to own the place where he lived? Was it merely that the possession of Five Oaks would complete her victory and his degradation?

Even now there were hours when memory seemed to be dragging her into the past; and when this occurred, a sense of weakness, of futility, of distaste for living, would sweep over her like a malady.

To look back, she knew, meant the frustration of effort.

To go on, taking the moment as it came, surmounting the obstacles, one by one, as they confronted her; to lavish her vital energy on permanent, not fugitive, endeavours,—these were the resolves which had carried her triumphantly over the years.

the empty whiskey bottles arranged in a row by the wainscoting. Above all, she remembered the stale odour of degeneration, of mingled whiskey and tobacco, which saturated the walls. Eighteen years ago, and nothing, not even that odour, had changed!

In those eighteen years she had spent her youth and had restored dead land to life; but this house in which Jason had lived was still sunk in immovable sloth and decay.

Ezra Flower passed, with his sprightly sparrow-like twitter, through the hall, and flung open the door of a room on the right—the room in which she had sat with the drunken old man while the storm broke outside.

What was there in this one man that was different from all other men whom she had known? Once she had beheld him within a magic circle of wonder and delight, divided and set apart from the surrounding dullness of existence.

Now the dullness had swept over him as the waste flows over the abandoned fields.

He leaned back in his chair, glancing from Nathan to Ezra Flower with morose and weary eyes. His face, which had been charming in youth, was now spiritless and inert. There were yellow blotches under his eyes; his eyelids were puffed and heavy;

"I wonder what becomes of them," he continued presently. "When you stop to think of it, it's odd what becomes of everything.

It makes the universe seem like a scrap heap.

"

This was the secret of her contentment, she knew, breathless activity.

If she was satisfied with her life, it was only because she never stopped long enough in her work to imagine the kind of life she should have preferred.

While her health was good and her energy unimpaired, she had no time for discontent. If she had looked for it, she sometimes told herself, she could have found sufficient cause for unhappiness; but she was careful not to look for it.

But the inner warmth died with the external beauty, and she dismissed the longing as weakness. "You know where that sort of thing leads you," she would tell herself sternly. "

Three months of love, and you pay for it with all the rest of your life.

"

In these years there were brief periods when her old dreams awakened.

Beauty that seemed too fugitive to be real was still more a torment than a delight to her.

The moon rising over the harp-shaped pine; the shocked corn against the red sunsets of autumn; the mulberry-coloured twilights of winter;—while she watched these things the past would glow again with the fitful incandescence of memory.

Afterwards, when she recalled this conversation, the ashen light of the kitchen flooded her mind. A small thing like that to decide all one's future!

Yet it seemed to her that it was always the little things, not the big ones, that influenced destiny; the fortuitous occurrence instead of the memorable occasion.

The incident of his going was apparently as trivial as her meeting with Jason in the road, as the failure of her aim when the gun had gone off, as the particular place and moment when she had fallen down in Fifth Avenue.

The air was alive with a multitude of whirling flakes, which descended swiftly and sped off into the space beyond the glimmer of her lantern.

After the wagon had disappeared the silence was so profound that she could almost hear the breathless flight of the snow-flakes from the veiled immensity of the sky.

By the glow of the lantern she could just distinguish the ghostly images of trees rising abruptly out of the shrouded stillness of the landscape.

"Good Lord, Miss Dorinda, who ever heard tell!" the girl exclaimed. Yet, in the end, the curtains, with other innovations, had become a part of the established order of living.

Why was it so difficult, she wondered, to bring people to accept either a new idea or a new object?

Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who lived in the future, and Nathan had always been ridiculed by his neighbours. The telephone, the modern churn, and the separator, what a protracted battle he had fought for each of these labour-saving inventions!

As there was no immediate work to be done, Dorinda sat down before the fire in her bedroom and turning to her workbasket, slipped her darning-egg into one of Nathan's socks.

She disliked darning, and because she disliked it she never permitted herself to neglect it.

Her passionate revolt from the inertia of the land had permeated the simplest details of living. The qualities with which she had triumphed over the abandoned fields were the virtues of the pioneers who had triumphed over life.

Then the thought came to her that, if her parents had been denied material gifts, they had possessed a spiritual luxury which she herself had never attained.

She had inherited, she realized, the religious habit of mind without the religious heart; for the instinct of piety had worn too thin to cover the generations.

Conviction! That, at least, they had never surrendered. The glow of religious certitude had never faded for them into the pallor of moral necessity. For them, the hard, round words in her great-grandfather's books were not as hollow as globes.

She recognized his disadvantages as clearly as ever; yet recognizing them made little difference in her affection. She liked him because, in spite of his unattractiveness, he possessed a moral integrity which she respected and a magnanimity which she admired.

He had accepted her austerity of demeanour as philosophically as he accepted a bad season; and to love but to refrain from the demands of love, was the surest way he could have taken to win her ungrudging esteem.

When she went out to remind Nimrod that he must start earlier to meet the six o'clock train, the snow was light and feathery on the surface, and the air was growing gradually milder.

Twenty-two years filled to overflowing with dominant interests; and yet she could see his face as distinctly as she had seen it that first morning in the russet glow of the broomsedge. Dust now, she told herself, nothing more.

Her memories of him were no better than deserted wasps' nests; but these dry and brittle ruins still clung there amid the cobwebs, in some obscure corner of her mind, and she could not brush them away.

Neither regret nor sentiment had preserved them, and yet they had outlasted both sentiment and regret.

He went out laughing, and she dropped back in her chair to wait until the hour came for her work in the dairy. John Abner was right, of course.

One of the exasperating things about men, she reflected, was that they were so often right.

It was perfectly true that she could not stay young for ever, and at forty-two, after twenty years of arduous toil, she ought to think of the future and take the beginning of the hill more gradually.

"

I wonder if it is because I've missed everything I really wanted that I cannot grow old?

" she asked herself with a start.

By the time she was midway down the walk, he had disappeared up the frozen road.

Except for the lighted house at her back she might have been alone in a stainless world before the creation of life.

A cold white moon was shedding a silver lustre over the landscape, which appeared as transparent as glass against the impenetrable horizon.

Dropping into a chair beside him, she raised a cup of coffee and drank it slowly in sips. Presently, notwithstanding her effort to minimize the cause for alarm, she became aware that anxiety was stealing over her as if it emanated from her surroundings.

She felt it first in the creeping sensation which ran like spiders over her flesh; then in an almost imperceptible twitching of her muscles; and at last in a delicate vibration of her nerves, as if a message were passing over electric wires in her body.

Then, suddenly, the fear mounted to her brain, and she found herself listening like John Abner for the crunching of wheels in the snow.

While she sat there she recalled, with one of the irresponsible flashes of memory which revived only when she was inactive, the afternoon when she had waited in the dripping woods to see Jason drive home with Geneva.

She was a girl then; now she was a woman and middle-aged; yet there was an intolerable quality in all suspense which made it alike.

Compared to those moments, this waiting was as the dead to the living agony. "Suppose I had married Jason and he was on that train, could I sit here like this?" she asked herself.

"No, I'd like to go myself. You'd better stay and look after the milking." How inexorable were the trivial necessities of the farm!

Anxieties might come and go, but the milking would not wait upon life or death.

Not until John Abner had gone upstairs did she perceive that she had been talking, as her mother would have said, "to make company for herself." "I've almost lost my taste for books," she thought, "and I used to be such a hungry reader."

"No, I'd like to go myself. You'd better stay and look after the milking."

How inexorable were the trivial necessities of the farm!

Anxieties might come and go, but the milking would not wait upon life or death. Not until John Abner had gone upstairs did she perceive that she had been talking, as her mother would have said, "to make company for herself."

"

If only they would leave the dignity and take away the sordidness of death

," she thought.

Dorinda sighed. "She needed love too much ever to find it," and she thought, "

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.

"

"If only he could hear what they are saying." There had never been a monument erected by public subscription at Pedlar's Mill, and she could not help thinking how pleased Nathan would have been if he could have taken an active part in the plan.

Well, some people had to wait until they were dead to get the things that would have made them happy while they were living.

As soon as Bob Ellgood stopped speaking, a general droning began in the room, and she grasped, after an instant of confusion, that everybody was trying to tell her of some boyish act of generosity which was still remembered.

Potatoes. Corn. Wheat. Cow-peas. Clover. Alfalfa. And back again. Alfalfa. Cowpeas. Potatoes. Corn. Wheat. Clover. That was all the seasons meant to her, one after one.

Her youth was going, she knew; but youth had brought so little that age could take away, why should she regret it?

The hair on her temples had turned from grey to white; her skin, beneath its warm flush, was creased with lines and roughened from exposure; but her eyes were still bright and clear, though the caged look had gone out of them.

"You will be more useful on the farm," she said consolingly, as they turned away; but he only shook his head and stared mutely after the receding train.

What John Abner desired, she saw, was not usefulness but glory.

Of the boys they saw go, a few were killed; but they were boys whom she knew only by sight. Two of Josiah's sons went, and one died of influenza after he had been decorated three times;

It was a quarter of a century since she had driven home with him that February afternoon. A quarter of a century, and she had not forgotten!

Well, when you have only the solitude to distract you, your memory is obliged to be long!

"I am not afraid," she replied in level tones, after she had dismounted and tethered Snowbird to the branch of a tree. "Are you?"

Her smile was as sharp as a blade. "

There is always something, isn't there, even if it is only the memory of fear?

"

"All the same I wish you could understand that I was not the kind of man to do the things that I did. I was a different sort of fellow entirely.

But what I was never seemed strong enough to withstand the pull of what I was not.

Of course, you'll never see that. You'll just go on thinking I was born rotten inside. Perhaps you're right. I don't know. I can't work it out."

Least of all myself. It was the way things turned out. Strange as it may seem to you, I always did the best that I could. If Father had died sooner, it might have been different. But everything happened too late.

The broomsedge grew over me before I could get away.

"

Even the vision of something different in the future, that illusion of approaching happiness which she had believed as indestructible as hope itself, had dissolved as the glimmer of swamp fires dissolves in the twilight. She knew now that life would never be different.

Experience, like love, would always be inadequate to the living soul.

What the imperfect actuality was to-day, it would be to-morrow and the day after; but there was rest now, not disquietude, in the knowledge.

At twenty, seeking happiness, she had been more unhappy, she told herself, than other women; but at fifty, she knew that she was far happier.

The difference was that at twenty her happiness had depended upon love, and at fifty it depended upon nothing but herself and the land.

To the land, she had given her mind and heart with the abandonment that she had found disastrous in any human relation. "I may have missed something, but I've gained more," she thought, "and what I've gained nobody can take away from me."

After all, it was not religion; it was not philosophy; it was nothing outside her own being that had delivered her from evil.

The vein of iron which had supported her through adversity was merely the instinct older than herself, stronger than circumstances, deeper than the shifting surface of emotion; the instinct that had said, "I will not be broken."

Though the words of the covenant had altered, the ancient mettle still infused its spirit.

The reckless courage that had started her on the dubious enterprise of her life had hardened at last into the fortitude with which she had triumphed over the unprofitable end Of her adventure.

Good and bad, right and wrong, they were all tangled together.

"How can I tell," she could ask, "what I should have done if I had not been myself?"

They were acts, she knew, which she would have condemned in another; but in her memory they appeared as inevitable as the rest of her conduct, and she could not unravel them from the frayed warp-and-woof of the past.

And she saw now that the strong impulses which had once wrecked her happiness were the forces that had enabled her to rebuild her life out of the ruins.

The reckless courage that had started her on the dubious enterprise of her life had hardened at last into the fortitude with which she had triumphed over the unprofitable end Of her adventure. Good and bad, right and wrong, they were all tangled together.

Round her, as evanescent as the last flare of day, there was this quivering haze, which was half dreamlike and half the tremor of perishing things.

Nature drifting into rest; flowers drifting into dust; grasshoppers drifting into death; faint sunshine drifting into darkness.

And in her own mind shadowy images or impressions drifting into thoughts.

She could smile now, with her butter selling in the Washington dairy at a dollar a pound, over the timidity with which she had, modestly asked thirty cents in the beginning.

By that subtle combination of prudence and imprudence which she called character, she had turned disappointment into contentment and failure into success.

Riding there in the silver gleams which flashed up from the life-everlasting, she appeared, after the hard years, to have ripened into the last mellowness of maturity.

Mr. Kettledrum shook his head. "I ain't lookin' for nothin' to be done, at least not in my time. It don't look as if the Government can afford to inspect and improve too, particularly when they're inspectin' the roads where mostly Democrats travel.

But it was a real comfort to know he thought it was the worst mail road he'd ever laid eyes on in the whole course of his recollection.

"

Mr. Kettledrum shook his head. "I ain't lookin' for nothin' to be done, at least not in my time.

It don't look as if the Government can afford to inspect and improve too, particularly when they're inspectin' the roads where mostly Democrats travel.

But it was a real comfort to know he thought it was the worst mail road he'd ever laid eyes on in the whole course of his recollection."

She smiled. "

That's because I never think of them. Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine at any price.

The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead."

She smiled. "That's because I never think of them. Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine at any price.

The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.

"

He drove on regretfully, while Dorinda, on Snowbird, trotted homeward. The light on the shocked corn was so faint that it waned to a shadow while she looked at it.

A flock of wild geese curved like blown smoke in the afterglow.

Immersed in this twilight as in the sadness of memory, she gazed at the autumn scene, with the small gold leaves on the locust trees, the windmill beyond the house, and the flickering of firelight in the west wing.

Her exultation over Jason's ruinous end had diminished now into an impersonal pity.

She had longed to punish him for his treachery; she had hated him for years, until she had discovered that hatred is energy wasted; but in all her past dreams of retribution, she had never once thought of the poorhouse.

Even as a question of justice, it seemed to her that the poorhouse was excessive.

"I don't reckon anybody will dispute yo' charity, Mrs. Pedlar," Samuel Larch was wheezing out. "Thar ain't nobody stands any higher to-day in this here community than you do.

You're hard on the surface, as my wife says, but you're human enough when you're whittled down to the core.

"

"

Tell your wife it is hard things that wear well

," she responded. "After all, somebody has to bear the burden, and I am better able to do it than any of the rest of you, except perhaps," she concluded indifferently, "James Ellgood."

"It looks to me as if they were letting you down," John Abner rejoined moodily; but his face cleared under her persuasion. After all, what he liked best was to be treated as an authority not only on farming, but on human nature as well.

The fact that he had lived as a recluse, and knew nothing whatever of life, did not interfere with the sincerity of his claim to profound wisdom.

Men were so immature, she found herself thinking; and they were never so immature as when they strutted most with importance. Since the emotional disaster of her youth, she had been incapable of either loving or hating without a caustic reservation;

The fact that he had lived as a recluse, and knew nothing whatever of life, did not interfere with the sincerity of his claim to profound wisdom.

Men were so immature, she found herself thinking; and they were never so immature as when they strutted most with importance.

Since the emotional disaster of her youth, she had been incapable of either loving or hating without a caustic reservation;

Though praise from John Abner was one of the things that pleased her most, she was incapable, she knew, of draining the sweetness of the moment before it escaped her.

When happiness came to her she had always the feeling that she was too dull or too slow to realize it completely until it was, over, when she responded to the memory as she had never responded to the actual occurrence.

"You're very good to me, John Abner," she answered. Her words were insufficient, but the habit of reticence was, as usual, too strong for her.

"You're very good to me, John Abner," she answered.

Her words were insufficient, but the habit of reticence was, as usual, too strong for her.

For hours she went about her work with the thoroughness that she exacted of herself on days of mental disturbance.

"Of both probably," John Abner rejoined. "

I've read of too many decent human beings going on the rocks to believe the fable that virtue alone will get you anywhere, unless it is to the poorhouse instead of the gaol.

"

The weight on her heart was so heavy that it was suffocating her. Again she thought: "Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all?" Again she felt as she had felt at her father's death: "

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

"

Dazed by the sedative, he was staring straight in front of him, oblivious of the autumn sunshine, oblivious of the uninteresting country, oblivious of her presence, lost beyond reach in that dark labyrinth of sensation.

His face was the face of one who had come to the edge of the world and looked over.

It expressed not pain, not despair even, but nothingness. A grey woollen comforter was tied over his head, and his features appeared to have fallen away beneath the mummy-like covering. He was neither young nor old, she saw;

From his apathy, she might have been no more to him than one of the old women in the poorhouse. A shiver ran over her, as if she had been touched by a dead hand.

Youth, beauty, victory, revenge,—what did any of these things signify before the inevitable triumph of time?

Yes, time had revenged her. If she had stood still, if she had not lifted a finger to help, time would still have revenged her; for time, she saw, always revenges one. She thought of the hot agony of that other October afternoon.

A shiver ran over her, as if she had been touched by a dead hand. Youth, beauty, victory, revenge,—what did any of these things signify before the inevitable triumph of time?

Yes, time had revenged her. If she had stood still, if she had not lifted a finger to help, time would still have revenged her; for time, she saw, always revenges one.

She thought of the hot agony of that other October afternoon. Of the patter of rain on the roof. Of the smell of wet grass underfoot. Of the sodden sky. Of the branches whipping her face.