nt less as a mental image, than as a vague yet impelling influence
for good. The impression was still in his thoughts, when he overtook
Judy Hatch a mile or two before reaching the crossroads, and stopped to
ask her to drive with him as far as her cottage. At sight of her wan and
haggard face, he felt again that impulse of pity, which seemed while it
lasted to appease the violence of his suffering.

"I haven't seen you to speak to for a long time," he observed, as she
mounted over the wheel to her place at his side.

"Not since that day by the brook," she answered, and flinched as if a
raw wound had been touched.

Though she did not look at him, he was conscious, through some subtle
undercurrent of feeling, that her spirit was drenched with the young
summer, with the pulsing of life of the June forest and the scent of
wild grape and honeysuckle which filled the air. Her face was lifted to
the fluted leaves of a sycamore, from which the song of a thrush rippled
like running water, and which gave her, if he had only known it, a
likeness to one of the minor saints in a primitive Italian painting. So
little, however, did her passion use her body as its medium that, after
glancing casually at her parted lips, he decided that she was probably
counting the eggs she had set to hatch in her hen-house, and hesitated
to interrupt the absorbing business of her calculations. Mentally,
he regarded her with the ungrudging respect which a man of any sort
instinctively yields to a woman who obviously disdains to ensnare his
judgment in the mesh of his senses. The palpitations of her spirit were
communicated to him in so elusive a process, that, even while he felt
the stir of his pulses, he was not aware that it was due in any measure
to the woman at his side. If she had been pretty--if she had been
even attractively plain--it would hardly have occurred to him that her
intense and breathless expression was associated with the hatching of
chickens; but, like other philosophers of whom he had never heard,
it was impossible for him to distinguish the qualities of the
thing-in-itself from the qualities of the phenomenon beneath his eyes.
Had he winnowed his superficial impressions the underlying thought would
probably have been: "No woman with a bosom as flat as that can have any
nonsense about her." From the first moment of their meeting he had never
doubted that it was this lack of "nonsense" which had attracted him. He
liked her evident