Eve sat looking countrywards, thinking, “Oh, do be quiet!” She wanted to lose herself in the beauty of the landscape, and she was in a mood to be delighted by a fern growing in a wall, or by the way the fresh green of a tree caught the sunlight. For the moment her spirit escaped and climbed up among the branches of an old yew, and fluttered there in the sparkling gloom, while Lizzie Straker kept up her caterwauling below. They had been on the open road for a fortnight, and Lizzie Straker still had the autumn tints of a black eye that an apple thrown in a Sussex village had given her. They had been hustled and chased on two occasions, Joan Gaunt coming in for most of the eggs and flour, perhaps because of her fierce leathery face and her defiant manner. Eve had recollections of cleaning herself in a station waiting-room, while a sergeant and two constables guarded the door. And, strange to say, some of her sympathies had been with the crowd. These three women had tramped and suffered together, yet each day only emphasised Eve’s discovery that she was failing to tone with her companions. They had begun by boring her, and they were beginning to exasperate her, rousing a spirit of antagonism that was ready to criticise them without mercy. Never in her life had Eve been in the presence of two such masses of ferocious prejudice. Their attitude towards the country was in complete contrast to hers. They were two blind fanatics on a pilgrimage, while Eve was a wayfarer whose eyes and ears and nostrils were open to Nature. Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker lived for words, bundles of phrases, arguments, assertions, accusations. They were two polemical pamphlets on legs sent out walking over God’s green earth. Eve noticed that their senses were less alive than hers, and that they were absurdly unobservant. Perhaps they had passed a cottage garden full of wallflowers, blood red and gold, and Eve had asked, “Did you smell them?” “Smell what?” “The flowers.” “What flowers?” “The wallflowers in that garden.” They had neither seen nor smelt anything, and they had looked at her as though she were a sentimental trifler. On another occasion, an orchard in bloom, filling a green hollow between two woods, had made Eve stand gazing. “Isn’t that perfect?” Lizzie Straker saw nothing but what her mad prejudices were allowing her to see. “I should like to come along with an axe and chop down all those trees. It would make quite a good protest.” Eve had felt satirical. “Why shouldn’t we blow up Chanctonbury Ring?” And they had taken her seriously. “We should want such a lot of dynamite.” “But it’s an idea, quite an idea.”