There is no sign of young passion
in her now--
The maiden's mouth is cold
. . .
Fold over simple fold
Binding her head.
Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a
thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of
a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust
and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of
love.
Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty,
directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her
but little. Her object being a winter's occupation and a winter's
home, there was no time to lose. Her experience of short hirings
had been such that she was determined to accept no more.
Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction of the place
whence Marian had written to her, which she determined to make use of
as a last shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse of
tempting. First she inquired for the lighter kinds of employment,
and, as acceptance in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied
next for the less light, till, beginning with the dairy and poultry
tendance that she liked best, she ended with the heavy and course
pursuits which she liked least--work on arable land: work of such
roughness, indeed, as she would never have deliberately voluteered
for.
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