She loved the plain, beautiful farming life that a man may take up in his hand because it is all of a piece, and see the links of the chain run even from end to end. Even now she could see the fair-haired child she had been still running about her home, the child that we all of us leave behind in our sacred place. She could hear the clatter of clogs in her father’s yard, and all about her the sound of voices which the daisied earth had stopped. It was strange, when she came to think of it, that she never heard her own. In all her memories of the child it seemed to her lip-locked, listening and dumb. Perhaps it was because she was shut in the child’s brain that she could not hear it speak. She could hear her mother’s voice, light and a little sharp, and her father’s a deep rumble in a beard. Even in the swift pictures flashing by her he looked slow, drifting with steady purpose from house to farm. Because of his slowness he seemed to her more alive than his wife; there was more time, somehow, to look at him as he passed. Her bustling, energetic mother had become little more than a voice, while the seldom-speaking man was a vital impression that remained. Rising up between the shadows that blotted them out was a certain old woolly sheep-dog and the red torch of the flowering currant beside the door. There was also a nook in the curve of the garden wall, where, under a young moon, she had seen the cattle coming across the fields, sunk to their horns in a fairy-silver mist.... It was an open-air life that took her long miles to school, clogging on frozen roads, through slanting rain or fighting against the wind. School itself seemed patched in a rather meaningless fashion on that life, much as the books in the parlour on the busy, unthinking house. A life of constant and steadily increasing work, from errands of all sorts, feeding the hens and fetching home the cows, to the heavier labour of washing and baking, milking, helping with the stock. Presently there had been the excitement of the first shy dance, and then the gradual drawing towards marriage as the tide draws to the moon.