If she had a bit of time there were other women in the hamlet and this woman due for birth and that one grieving because a child was dead, or one had a new pattern for the making of a flower upon a shoe, or some new way to cut a coat. And there were days when she went into the town with some grain or cabbage to sell, she and the man together, and there in the town were strange sights to see and think about if ever she had time to think at all. But the truth was that this woman was such a one as could live well content with the man and children and think of nothing else at all. To her--to know the fullness of the man’s frequent passion, to conceive by him and know life growing within her own body, to feel this new flesh take shape and grow, to give birth and feel a child’s lips drink at her breast--these were enough. To rise at dawn and feed her house and tend the beasts, to sow the land and reap its fruit, to draw water at the well for drink, to spend days upon the hills reaping the wild grass and know the sun and wind upon her, these were enough. She relished all her life: giving birth, the labor on the land, eating and drinking and sleeping, sweeping and setting in rude order her house and hearing the women in the hamlet praise her for her skill in work and sewing; even quarreling with the man was good and set some edge upon their passion for each other. So therefore she rose to every day with zest. On this day when the man had eaten and sighed and taken up his hoe and gone somewhat halting as he always did to the field, she rinsed the bowls and sat the old woman out in the warmth of the sun and bade the children play near but not go too near the pond. Then she took her own hoe and set forth, stopping once or twice to look back. The thin voice of the old woman carried faintly on the breeze and the mother smiled and went on. To watch the door was the sole thing the old woman could do and she did it proudly. Old and half blind as she was, yet she could see if anyone came near who should not and she could raise a cry. A troublesome old woman she was, and a very troublesome old care often, and worse than any child and more, because she grew wilful and could not be cuffed as a child could. Yet when the cousin’s wife said one day, “A very good thing it will be for you, goodwife, when that old thing is dead, so old and blind and full of aches and pains and pettish with her food doubtless,” the mother had replied in the mild way she had when she was secretly tender, “Yes, but a very good use still, too, to watch the door, and I hope she will live until the girl is bigger.”