id Kennedy. "She is very passive. It's enough to look
at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow,
prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind--an inertness
that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises
of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you
see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She's the daughter
of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd;
the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with
the cook of his widowed father--a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who
passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter
threats against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to
serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of
their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a
subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that
fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads--over all our
heads...."

The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red
in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed
rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant
horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed
with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in
minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge
of a copse a waggon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.
Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red
sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two
slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportions. And the clumsy figure of
the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on
the background of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his
carter's whip quivered high up in the blue. Kennedy discoursed.

"She's the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put
her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the
tenant's wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith,
a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every
afternoon. I don't know what induced me to notice her at all. There
are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness
in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at
a vag