Mrs. Pence, upon a nearer view, found Abner all she had hoped. Confronted by his stalwart limbs and expansive shoulders, she was no longer a behemoth,--she felt almost like a sylph. She looked up frankly, and with a sense of growing comfort, into his broad face where a good strong growth of chestnut beard was bursting through his ruddy cheeks and swirling abundantly beneath his nose. She looked up higher, to his wide forehead, where a big shock of confident hair rolled and tumbled about with careless affluence. And with no great shyness she appraised his hands and his feet--those strong forceful hands that had dominated the lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up blackly to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender girlhood--that remote, incredible time--was on her once more. "I shall never feel large again," she said. How right she was! Nobody ever felt large for long when Abner Joyce happened to be about. V Abner regarded Mrs. Pence and her magnificence with a sombre intensity, far from ready to approve. He knew far more about her than she could know about him--thanks to the activities of a shamefully discriminating (or undiscriminating) press--and he was by no means prepared to give her his countenance. Face to face with her opulence and splendour he set the figure of his own mother--that sweet, patient, plaintive little presence, now docilely habituated, at the closing in of a long pinched life, to unremitting daily toil still unrewarded by ease and comfort or by any hope or promise or prospect of it. There was his father too--that good gray elder who had done so much faithful work, yet had so little to show for it, who had fished all day and had caught next to nothing, who had given four years out of his young life to the fight for freedom only to see the reward so shamefully fall elsewhere.... Abner evoked here a fanciful figure of Palmer Pence himself, whom he knew in a general way to be high up in some monstrous Trust. He saw a prosperous, domineering man who with a single turn of the hand had swept together a hundred little enterprises and at the same time had swept out a thousand of the lesser fry into the wide spaces of empty ruin, and who had insolently settled down beside his new machine to catch the rain of coins minted for him from the wrongs of an injured and insulted people....