y,
putting it in the kettle to save time. "And I ought to keep up my
strength, for I must write a good-bye letter that will show people what
they've lost...."

The egg was good; and as she would never eat another she cut her
buttered bread into fingers and dipped them into the yolk, though she
knew grown-up people never did it. The bread was good too. It was only
because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to
leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures
of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp
brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no
more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and
moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the
plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of
departure for the fancy. Even a potato roasted in its skin, if it was
the right floury sort, had an entrancing, ethereal substance; one could
imagine that thus a cirrus cloud might taste in the mouth. If the name
were changed, angels might eat it. Potato plants were lovely, too.

Very vividly, for her mind's eye was staring wildly on the past rather
than look on this present, which, with all the honesty of youth, she
meant should have no future, there sprung up before her on the bare
plastered wall a potato-field she and her mother had seen one day when
they went to Cramond. Thousands and thousands of white flowers running
up to a skyline in ruler-drawn lines. They had walked by the River
Almond afterwards, linking arms, exclaiming together over the dark
glassy water, which slid over small frequent weirs, the tents of green
fire which the sun made of the overarching branches, the patches of moss
that grew so symmetrically between the tree-trunks on the steep
river-banks above the path that they might have been the dedicatory
tablets of rustic altars. When the cool of the evening came they had sat
and watched a wedding-party dance quadrilles on a lawn by the river,
overhung by chestnut trees and severed by a clear and rapid channel,
weedless as the air, from an island crowded by the weather-bleached
ruins of a mill. The bride and bridegroom were not young, and the stiff
movements with which they yet gladly led the dance, and the quiet, tired
merriment of their middle-aged friends, gave the occasion a quality of
its own; with which the faded purples of the loosestrife and ma