e sight of his young mistress
half sitting, half lying on the ground struck him as droll.

Rosie got up and brushed herself again. She knew it must be dinner-time.
The fact had been at the back of her mind all through these minutes of
comforting negation. She should have been in the house laying the table
while her mother cooked the meal. It was the first time in years that
she had rebelled against a duty. It was not exactly rebellion now. It
was something more serious than that. She realized it as she stood where
she was, with hands hanging limply, and said to herself, "I've quit."

Nevertheless, she emerged slowly from the jungle of vines and followed
Antonio down the long, rustling aisle. There was a compulsion in the
day's routine to which she felt the necessity of yielding. She had
traversed half the length of the greenhouse before it came to her that
it was precisely to the day's routine that she couldn't return. Anything
was better than that. Any fate was preferable to the round of cooking
and cleaning and seed-time and harvest of which every detail was
impregnated with the ambitions she had given up. She had lived through
these tasks and beyond them out into something else--into a great
emptiness in which her spirit found a kind of ease. She could no more go
back to them than a released soul could go back to earth.

In the yard she stood looking at the poor, battered old house. Inside,
her father, who had probably by this time returned from town, would be
sitting down to table. Antonio--to save the serving of two sets of
meals--would be sitting down with him. Her mother would be bringing
something from the kitchen, holding a hot platter with the corner of her
apron. If she went in her mother would sit down, too, while she herself
would do the running to and fro between the table and the pantry or the
stove. She would snatch a bite for herself in the intervals of
attendance.

Rosie revolted. She revolted not against the drudgery, which was part of
the matter-of-course of living unless one "kept a girl"; she revolted
against the living itself. It was all over for her. In proof that it was
she turned her back on it.

Her moving away was at first without purpose. If her feet strayed into
the familiar path that ran down the hill between the hothouses and the
apple-trees it was because there was no other direction to take. She
hadn't meant to go up through the wood to Duck Rock before she found
herself doing it.