Crow's feet! She turned with a start from the brood of white turkeys she was counting. Yes, she was too young, she was only thirty-three, but she was already beginning to break. Youth was going! Youth was going, the words echoed and reechoed through the emptiness of the future. Week by week, month by month, year by year, youth was slipping away; and she had never known the completeness, the fulfilment, that she had expected of life. Even now, she could not tell herself, she did not know, what it was that she had missed. It was not love, nor was it motherhood. No, the need went deeper than nature. It lay so deep, so far down in her hidden life, that the roots of it were lost in the rich darkness. Though she felt these things vaguely, without thinking that she felt them, it seemed to her, standing there with her gaze on the brood of white turkeys, that all she had ever hoped for or believed in was eluding her grasp. In a little while, with happiness still undiscovered, she would be as wrinkled and grey as her mother. Only her mother's restless habit of work would remain to fill the vacancy of her days. "I've been working too hard, Fluvanna," she said, "and what do I get out of it?" "You oughtn't to let yo'self go, Miss Dorindy. There ain't any use in the world for you to slave and stint the way you do. You ought to go about mo' and begin to take notice." Dorinda laughed. "You talk as if I were a widower." "Naw'm, I ain't. No widower ever lived the way you do." "It's true. I haven't bought a good dress or been anywhere for ten years." "Thar ain't a particle of use in it. You'll be old and dried up soon enough. What's the use of being young and proud if you don't strut?" Yes, Fluvanna was right. What was the use? She had made a success of her undertaking; but it was inadequate because there were no spectators of her triumph. She had kept so close to the farm that her neighbours knew her only as a dim figure against the horizon, a moving shape among corn shocks and hay ricks in the flat landscape, an image that vanished with these inanimate objects in the lengthening perspective. Even in the thin and isolated community in which she lived, she did not stand out, clearly projected, like James Ellgood; perhaps, for the simple reason, she told herself now, that she had drilled her energy down into the soil instead of training it upward. "I believe you're right, Fluvanna," she said. "Now that we're out of debt and things are going fairly well, I ought to try to get something out of life while I'm still young."