make several short skirts in which
she could enjoy the less frequented parts of Nevis while her aunt
slept. Without realising it, for nothing in her monotonous life had
touched her latent characteristics, she was essentially a creature of
action. Even her day-dreams had been energetic, and if they had filled
her life it was because they had the field to themselves. In earlier
centuries she would have defended one of the castles of her ancestors
with as much efficiency and spirit as any man among them, and had she
been born thirty years later she would certainly have entered one
of the careers open to women, and filled her life with active
accomplishment. But she knew little of female careers, save, to be
sure, of those dedicated to fashion, which did not interest her; and
less of self-analysis. But she felt and lived in the present moment
intensely. For twenty-two years she had dwelt in the damp and windy
North, and now the dream of those years was fulfilled and she was
amidst the warmth and glow of the tropics. It was the greatest
happiness that life had offered her and she abandoned herself to it
headlong.

As she entered the capital she suddenly became aware that she was
holding her skirts high over her hoop in a most unladylike manner. She
blushed, shook them down, and assumed a carriage and gait which would
have been approved by even the fastidious Mrs. Nunn. But she was no
less interested in the animated scene about her. The long street
winding from the Court House to the churchyard on the farther edge of
the town was a mass of moving colour and a babel of sound. The women,
ranging from ebony through all the various shades of copper and olive
to that repulsive white where the dark blood seems to flow just
beneath the skin, and bedecked in all the violence of blues and
greens, reds and yellows, some in country costume, their heads covered
with kerchiefs, others in a travesty on the prevailing fashion, stood
in their shops or behind the long double row of temporary stalls,
vociferating at the passers by as they called attention to fowl,
meats, hot soup, fruit, vegetables, wild birds, fish, cigars, sugar
cakes, castor oil, cloth, handkerchiefs, and wood. Many of the early
buyers were negroes of the better class, others servants of the white
planters and of Bath House, come early to secure the best bargains.
Anne was solicited incessantly, even her skirts being pulled, for
since emancipation, four years before, the