His only answer was a comical sigh, and after a long pause she repeated more sharply, "There's no use thinking about that." Some hidden edge to her tone made him glance at her quickly. This was another moment when the keenness of Nathan's perceptions surprised her. "You'd be just as free as you are now," he said discreetly but hopefully. "I couldn't stand any love-making." Though the light bloomed on her lips and cheeks, her eyes darkened with memory. He sighed again less hopefully. What a pity it was, she thought, that everything about him grew in the wrong way; his hair like moth-eaten fur, his flat clownish features; his long moustache which always reminded her of bleached grass. Well, even so, you couldn't have everything. If the outward man had been more attractive, the inward one, she acknowledged, would have been less humble; and when all was said and done, few virtues are more comfortable to live with than humility. "It doesn't do any good to keep thinking of that," she reiterated firmly, but the firmness had oozed from her mind into her manner. The fact that she needed Nathan on the farm was driven home to her every day of her life. Without him, she would never become anything more than a farmer who was extraordinary chiefly in being a woman as well; and this provoking disadvantage was a continual annoyance. Her life, in spite of the companionship of Fluvanna, was an empty one, and as the shadow of middle age grew longer, she would become more and more solitary. They had reached the high ground by the graveyard, and over Gooseneck Creek she saw the red chimneys of Five Oaks. At the sight a suffering thought awoke and throbbed in her brain. "I'll never interfere with you, Dorinda," Nathan said in a husky tone. She turned suddenly and looked into his eyes. "It doesn't do any good to keep thinking about it," she insisted in an expressionless voice as if she were reciting a phrase she had learned by heart. XVII The exact moment of her yielding was so vague that she could never remember it; but three weeks later they drove over to the Presbyterian church at Pedlar's Mill and were married. Until the evening before she had told no one but Fluvanna; and only the pastor's wife, a farmer or two, and Nathan's children, witnessed the marriage. As they stood together before the old minister, a shadowy fear fluttered into Dorinda's mind, and she longed to turn and run back to the safe loneliness of Old Farm. "Can it be possible," she asked herself, "that I am doing this thing?" She seemed to be standing apart as a spectator while she watched some other woman married to Nathan. When it was over the few farmers came up to shake hands with her; but their manner was repressed and unnatural, and even the children had become bashful and constrained.