ives of the clergy. And the parents would take the
tragedy ungracefully. The woman would look out from her kitchen window
at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls
and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would
not have thought that animals could have, the look of being underpaid.
Perhaps he would kneel down among those glass bells which, when they are
bogged in Essex clay on a winter afternoon, are grimly symbolical of the
end that comes to the counter-meteorological hopes of the small-holder.
The fairness and weedy slenderness which during their courtship she had
frequently held out to her friends as proof of his unusual refinement,
would now seem to her the outward and visible signs of the lack of
pigment and substance which had left him at the mercy of a speculator's
lying prospectus. When he came in to the carelessly cooked meal there
would be a quarrel. "Why did you ever bring me to this wretched place?"
She would rise from the table and run towards the bedroom, but before
she got to the door she would remember the coffin, and she would have to
remain in the sitting-room to weep. She would not look pretty when she
wept, for she was worn out by child-birth and nursing and grief and lean
living on this damp and disappointing place. Presently he would go out,
leaving the situation as it was, to potter once more among the glass
bells, and she would sit and think ragingly of his futile occupation,
while an inner region of her heart that kept the climate of her youth
grieved because he had gone out to work after having eaten so small a
meal.

Marion rose to her feet that she might start at once for these poor
souls and tell them that they must not quarrel, and warn the woman that
all human beings when they are hurt try to rid themselves of the pain by
passing it on to another, and help her by comprehension of what she was
feeling about the loss of the child. But immediately she laughed aloud
at the thought of herself, of all women in the world, going on such an
errand. If she went to Coltsfoot now the anticipation of meeting
strangers would turn her to lead as soon as she saw the house, and the
woman would wonder apprehensively who this sullen-faced stranger coming
up the path might be; when she gained admittance she would be able to
speak only of trivial things and her voice would sound insolent, and
they would take her for some kind of district visitor who intruded