Now, there were no flowers in the garden; only the yew-tree by the gate that hung her waxen blossom along the undersides of the branches. Hazel hated the look of the frozen garden; she had an almost unnaturally intense craving for everything rich, vivid, and vital. She was all these things herself, as she communed with Foxy before starting. She had wound her hair round her head in a large plait and her old black hat made the colour richer. 'You'm nigh on thirty miles to go there and back, unless you get a lift,' said Abel. 'A lift? I dunna want never no lifts!' said Hazel scornfully. 'You'm as good a walker as John of No Man's Parish,' replied Abel, 'and he walks for ever, so they do say.' As Hazel set forth in the sharp, fresh morning, the Callow shone with radiant brown and silver, and no presage moved within it of the snow that would hurtle upon it from mountains of cloud all night. When Hazel had chosen her dress--a peacock blue serge--and had put it on there and then in the back of the shop, curtained off for this purpose, she went to her aunt's. Her cousin Albert regarded her with a startled look. He was in a margarine shop, and spent his days explaining that Margarine was as good as butter. But, looking at Hazel, he felt that here _was_ butter--something that needed no apology, and created its own demand. The bright blue made her so radiant that her aunt shook her head. 'You take after your ma, 'Azel,' she said. Her tone was irritated. 'I be glad.' Her aunt sniffed. 'You ought to be as glad to take after one parent as another, if you were jutiful,' she said. 'I dunna want to take after anybody but myself.' Hazel flushed indignantly. 'Well! we _are_ conceited!' exclaimed her aunt. 'Albert, don't give 'Azel all the liver and bacon. I s'pose your mother can eat as well as schoolgirls?' Albert was gazing at Hazel so animatedly, so obviously approving of all she said, that her aunt was very much ruffled. 'No wonder you only want to be like yourself,' he said. 'Jam! my word, Hazel, you're jam!' 'Albert!' cried his mother raspingly, with a pathetic note of pleading, 'haven't I always taught you to say preserve?' She was not pleading against the inelegant word, but against Hazel. When Albert went back to the shop, Hazel helped her aunt to wash up. All the time she was doing this, with unusual care, and cleaning the knives--a thing she hated--she was waiting anxiously for the expected invitation to stay the night. She longed for it as the righteous long for the damnation of their enemies. She never paid a visit except here, and to her it was a wild excitement. The gas-stove, the pretty china, the rose-patterned wall-paper, were all strange and marvellous as a fairy-tale. At home there was no paper, no lath and plaster, only the bare bricks, and the ceiling was of bulging sailcloth hung under the rafters.