hold to train her as a servant, if she showed any aptitude. Mrs.
Harnham was a young lady who before she married had been Miss Edith
White, living in the country near the speaker's cottage; she was now very
kind to her through knowing her in childhood so well. She was even
taking the trouble to educate her. Mrs. Harnham was the only friend she
had in the world, and being without children had wished to have her near
her in preference to anybody else, though she had only lately come;
allowed her to do almost as she liked, and to have a holiday whenever she
asked for it. The husband of this kind young lady was a rich
wine-merchant of the town, but Mrs. Harnham did not care much about him.
In the daytime you could see the house from where they were talking. She,
the speaker, liked Melchester better than the lonely country, and she was
going to have a new hat for next Sunday that was to cost fifteen and
ninepence.

Then she inquired of her acquaintance where he lived, and he told her in
London, that ancient and smoky city, where everybody lived who lived at
all, and died because they could not live there. He came into Wessex two
or three times a year for professional reasons; he had arrived from
Wintoncester yesterday, and was going on into the next county in a day or
two. For one thing he did like the country better than the town, and it
was because it contained such girls as herself.

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted girl,
the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its lights
and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began moving round
as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her right hand, she
being as it were the fixed point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid
universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of all the form of her
late interlocutor. Each time that she approached the half of her orbit
that lay nearest him they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that
unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often
leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion,
overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.

When the horses slowed anew he stepped to her side and proposed another
heat. 'Hang the expense for once,' he said. 'I'll pay!'

She laughed till the tears came.

'Why do you laugh, dear?' said he.

'Because--you are so genteel that you must have plenty of money, and only
s