She took a last look at the patch-work country, noted once again the lie of the road through the valley below, and then, with a little gasp like a bather taking the plunge, took to her heels and ran down the hill-side. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VI How long a day can be! An hour or less—so much less than an hour—how it can lie in one’s memory like an interminable road, when pleasant years are more forgotten than towns passed in the train. How long a little time can be! Once I saw a woman—not Laura—grow old between a question and an answer—between the opening and the shutting of a door. Laura, at ten or twelve, would usher in a reminiscence with “When I was a little girl,” and look bewildered if you laughed. “When I was young,” said Laura, as innocently, at seventeen. And each time Laura would be thinking of that Age of Gold and Crystal Palaces, with Mother at the beginning, and at the end of it—Justin. And yet, less of it than of the four-hour Odyssey that closes her childhood, that cuts her memories in two and provides you with the spectacle, comical, pathetic, or merely curious, as it happens to strike you, of a proved soul waiting wearily, amid school books and pig-tails and lengthening skirts, amid vanities and ignorances and experiments, for body and brain to grow up to it. Those four hours—joyfully down dale and up hill to another glimpse of a receding heaven, and then down dale again, not quite so springily—those four hours Laura never forgot. Each incident of the road—the stumble-stone that cut her knee: a bolting rabbit startling itself and her, and the fat thrush cracking a snail on her first milestone: a stony-faced house seen through laurels that encircled it stiffly like an Elizabethan ruff: meteoric motor-cars that frightened her into ditches, and once a nettle-bed: that black wood where, through dead leaves, her own shadow had stalked ghoulishly behind her, upon feet that were the echoes of her own: the sun-pool of a chalk-pit, trailing and tropical, like pictures in the _Swiss Family Robinson_, with mighty garlands of old-man’s beard: a village pond with ducks and slime and dragon-flies: babies on door-steps, and shrill women: sharp-horned staring cows: dust and sunshine and the terrible tramps—each and all had been etched indelibly upon a mind that excitement had made more than ever sensitive to impressions.