eons and others, and say that whisky
is your father's weakness, and would they please oblige and gratify
you by not offering him any.

CHAPTER XVII

NARCISSUS TRIANDRUS STRIATUM, THE GOOD COMRADE

The winter wore away; a very long winter, and a very cold one to those
at the cottage who were used to the mild west country. But at last
spring came; late and with bitter winds and showers of sleet, but none
the less wonderful, especially as one had to look to see the tentative
signs of its coming. March in Marbridge used to mean violets and
daffodils, tender green shoots and balmy middays. March here means
days of pale clean light and great sweeping wind which chased grey
clouds across a steely sky, and stirred the lust for fight and freedom
in men's minds and set them longing to be up and away and at battle
with the world or the elements. This restlessness, which those who
have lost it call divine, took possession of Julia that springtime,
and a dissatisfaction with the simple life and its narrow limits beset
her. Surely, she found herself asking, this was not the end of all
things--this cottage to be the limit of her life and ambitions; her
work to grow cabbages and eat them, to keep her father in the paths of
temperance and sobriety, and to make Johnny's closing days happy? The
March winds spoke vaguely of other things; they whispered of the life
she had put from her; the big, wide, moving, thinking, feeling life
which would have been living indeed. Worse, they whispered of the man
who had offered it to her, the man whom her heart told her she would
have made friend and comrade if only circumstances had allowed him to
make her wife. But she thrust these thoughts from her; she had no
choice, she never had a choice; now less if possible than before,
there was no heart-aching decision to make. The work she had taken up
could not be put down; she must go on even if voices stronger and more
real than these wind ones called her out.

One day the crocuses which Mijnheer had sent came into flower; Julia
thought she had never seen anything so beautiful as the little purple
and golden cups, partly because they had been sent in kindness of
heart, partly, no doubt, because she had grown them herself, and she
had never grown a flower which had its root in the inarticulate joy of
all things at the first flowering of dead brown earth and monotonous
lifeless days. The next event in her calendar, and Johnny's, was the
bloomin