And now there came to her this newly-realised population, bruised by life down to the softness of humanity. As to her those dry, bleached ghosts of the rude ages were masculine, so those more human ghosts that rose up out of the centuries were feminine. Increasingly, they had splintered their emotions; they had departed from the stark, simple facts; they had become more complex and more wistful. The stars and the stones had meant less and less to them; the Man of Sorrows, and not the terrible orbs of heaven, had been their god. They were kneaded, malleable. They had endured much, but in the full consciousness of endurance; their spirit, even if not their voice, had groaned under the load of life and its ironies; they had not accepted as a matter of course, unquestioning, a lot that was hard. For all that, they had not been the less courageous; perhaps even their courage had been of a sublimer brand. And they were women, women, always women. The men had remained nearer to the old, strong, practical stock,--the purveyors of necessities. It was upon the women that civilisation had had the most effect. Calladine himself, the most highly civilised man that Clare knew, had always seemed to her instinct more like a woman,--sitting in his house and picking his griefs into smaller and smaller pieces. But Calladine’s griefs were not very real griefs,--she knew that now. She knew that he was, really, quite negligible. She had been almost afraid, for a brief period, to go out upon the Downs,--afraid of forms rising up round her, of hands pulling at her garments, and of eyes seeking hers until she was forced to look into their depths. It was not that she any longer felt resentment against the population her own imagination had evoked; no, the Downs were enriched by their company, and the calm heights acquired a new significance by contrast with their soft rustling tumult. It was that she feared the knowledge which would come to her if she spent many hours alone with those ghostly inhabitants whispering round her like dead leaves; she feared what she would learn; she would not probe her new half-guessed discovery. Things were a degree less terrible so long as they remained without a name.