To every woman comes a time in life when she is ripe for the decisive man; and it is often a barren hour when he fails to appear. For Vashti the hour and the man had come together, and she knew it as she met Glasson's look. Putting out his hands, ingrained with earth in the finest seams of them, he laid them heavily on her shoulders, like a yoke. His bag swung forward and hit her on the chest, but neither of them noticed it. "Vashti, you'm got to make'n end," he said. "One way or t'other. Which es et to be?" She shook under his gaze, her lids drooped, but she tried to pout out her full underlip with a pretence of petulance. Suddenly his grip tightened. "So 'ee won't tell me? Then by God, I'll do the tellin'! You'm my woman, do'ee hear? Mine, and neither Will Strick nor any other chap shall come between us two." Wheeling her round, he held her against the rough side of the shaft and bent his face to hers; she felt his lips crush on her own till she could have cried out with pain if she had been able to draw breath. When he let her go her breast heaved, and she stood with lowered head holding her hand across her mouth. "Now we'll get the cows, my lass," said Glasson quietly, "and take'n home, and then you shall ask me to step in." * * * * * During the short, fierce courtship that followed Vashti saw very little of Willie Strick, though she heard he talked much of emigrating, vowing he would disappear in the night and not come home until he had made a fortune. All of Vashti's nature was in abeyance save for one emotion--a stunned, yet pleasurable, submission. It was not until several months after her marriage that she began to feel again the more ordinary and yet more complex sensations of everyday life. If she had to the full a primitive woman's joy in being possessed, she had also the instinctive need for possessing her man utterly, and James Glasson was only partly hers. It was borne in on her that by far the larger side of him was his own, never to be given to any woman. Ambition and an uncanny secretiveness made up the real man; he had set himself to winning his wife chiefly because the want of her distracted him from his work and fretted him. He bent the whole of life to his purposes, without any parade of power, but with a laborious care that gradually settled on Vashti like a blight. When she realized that no matter how rightly she wore her little bits of finery, he no longer noticed them, realized that she was merely a necessity to him as his woman--something to be there when she was wanted, she began to harden. He still had a fascination for her when he chose to exert it--his very carelessness and sureness of her were what made the fascination, but gradually it wore thinner and slacker, and a sullen resentment began to burn through her seeming submission.