and seeing them under a different light, I saw them
very differently. Black against the sun, they had seemed comic; but
bright against greenwood and grey cloud, they were not comic but tragic;
for there are not a few things that seem fantastic in the twilight,
and in the sunlight are sad. I saw that she had a grand, gaunt mask of
ancient honour and endurance, and wide eyes sharpened to two shining
points, as if looking for that small hope on the horizon of human life.
I also saw that her cart contained carrots.

"Don't you feel, broadly speaking, a beast," I asked my friend, "when
you go so easily and so fast?" For we had crashed by so that the crazy
cart must have thrilled in every stick of it.

My friend was a good man, and said, "Yes. But I don't think it would do
her any good if I went slower."

"No," I assented after reflection. "Perhaps the only pleasure we can
give to her or any one else is to get out of their sight very soon."

My friend availed himself of this advice in no niggard spirit; I felt as
if we were fleeing for our lives in throttling fear after some frightful
atrocity. In truth, there is only one difference left between the
secrecy of the two social classes: the poor hide themselves in darkness
and the rich hide themselves in distance. They both hide.

As we shot like a lost boat over a cataract down into a whirlpool of
white roads far below, I saw afar a black dot crawling like an insect.
I looked again: I could hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman,
with her slow old donkey, still toiling along the main road. I asked my
friend to slacken, but when he said of the car, "She's wanting to go," I
knew it was all up with him. For when you have called a thing female you
have yielded to it utterly. We passed the old woman with a shock that
must have shaken the earth: if her head did not reel and her heart
quail, I know not what they were made of. And when we had fled
perilously on in the gathering dark, spurning hamlets behind us, I
suddenly called out, "Why, what asses we are! Why, it's She that is
brave--she and the donkey. We are safe enough; we are artillery and
plate-armour: and she stands up to us with matchwood and a snail! If you
had grown old in a quiet valley, and people began firing cannon-balls as
big as cabs at you in your seventieth year, wouldn't you jump--and she
never moved an eyelid. Oh! we go very fast and very far, no doubt--"

As I spoke came a curious noise, and my fri