aspirations and imaginations would drop
off from her with the years of her early youth, as the lime-flowers drop
downwards with the summer heats. She would forget them. They would linger
a little in her head, and, perhaps, always wake at some sunset hour or
some angelus chime, but not to trouble her. Only to make her cradle song
a little sadder and softer than most women's was. Unfed, they would sink
away and bear no blossom.

She would grow into a simple, hardy, hardworking, God-fearing Flemish
woman like the rest. She would marry, no doubt, some time, and rear
her children honestly and well; and sit in the market stall every day,
and spin and sew, and dig and wash, and sweep, and brave bad weather,
and be content with poor food to the end of her harmless and laborious
days--poor little Bebee!

He saw her so clearly as she would be--if he let her alone.

A little taller, a little broader, a little browner, less sweet of voice,
less soft of skin, less flower-like in face; having learned to think only
as her neighbors thought, of price of wood and cost of bread; laboring
cheerily but hardly from daybreak to nightfall to fill hungry mouths:
forgetting all things except the little curly-heads clustered round her
soup-pot, and the year-old lips sucking at her breasts.

A blameless life, an eventless life, a life as clear as the dewdrop, and
as colorless; a life opening, passing, ending in the little green wooded
lane, by the bit of water where the swans made their nests under the
willows; a life like the life of millions, a little purer, a little
brighter, a little more tender, perhaps, than those lives usually are,
but otherwise as like them as one ear of barley is like another as it
rises from the soil, and blows in the wind, and turns brown in the strong
summer sun, and then goes down to the sod again under the sickle.

He saw her just as she would be--if he let her alone.

But should he leave her alone?

He cared nothing; only her eyes had such a pretty, frank, innocent
look like a bird's in them, and she had been so brave and bold with him
about those silken stockings; and this little ignorant, dreamful mind of
hers was so like a blush rosebud, which looks so close-shut, and so
sweet-smelling, and so tempting fold within fold, that a child will pull
it open, forgetful that he will spoil it forever from being a full-grown
rose, and that he will let the dust, and the sun, and the bee into its
tender bosom--and men