“You are a just man. But they do not want your justice. They want to do as they have always done, and be as they have always been. The wild pigs like the swamp. They do not want to go with you to clean straw in a stable.” Cyrille was silent. “I used to believe,” he thought, “I have always believed, that the poor only needed to be shown the right road to gladly follow it; that they only wanted to be led to the water-side to willingly wash and be clean. But I begin to fear that I have deceived myself.” Aloud he said: “Were I on my own property, I might allow it to be ruined if I chose, though to do so would be, not benevolence, but weakness. Here, however, I have no choice. I am but the servant of others. I must enforce what I know to be right.” “They will kill you.” “That must be as it will. Threatened men usually live long.” “Not always; and not here.” Then she resumed her work, and the pallid rustling ribands of the canes fell beneath her rusty blade. “And whoever slays you,” she added as she worked, “will never be found. Everyone will make common cause with him. Everyone will be for him, risk all for him, hide him in their beds, swear falsely for him by the Madonna’s self. He will be beloved of all, and pass safely by signs from house to house, from village to village, from province to province. The law will never get hold of his little finger. The hatred of the stranger is more binding than oaths.” “Then why do you not share it?” “Why?” She did not know why. She had not asked herself. Certainly she ought to be on the side of her own people, and not his. Why was she not so? “You are in the right,” she said simply; “and you are alone against hundreds. I have never been at one with my father’s people. My mother was a woman of Viterbo. I lived with her in Viterbo till she died. She had left my father because he was wicked and cruel. She was good; so good! She taught me to see that the ways they follow here are evil. They are bad men, as my father was. And they have no love for the woods. You have. And now good-day. They had best not see you here. They will think we plot some mischief against them.” She bound all the cut canes together in one bundle, heaved them upward on to her head, and when loaded went away along the banks of the stream, walking erect and swiftly, the great sheaf swaying as she moved. So passed the women of Etruria and of Latium before her through these woods. The work of husbandry is the only work which does not change with time, but remains, at least in Italy, natural, noble, and beautiful in its attitudes and its simplicity. He looked at her as he might have looked at some statue exhumed from the soil. She was as sexless as a statue to him; he wore the ice armour of an absorbing and despairing passion, which left him neither sight nor sense for any more fugitive feelings.