THREE:Though they were technically a Couple, they never spoke of love. They never even kissed or held each other's hands, however tenderly the velvet darkness called. He told her about his work at Odiamabout the little calf that was born that day, or the trouble he had had, patching the rent in the pigsty, or how the poultry had not taken well to their new food, but preferred something with more sharps in it. She in her turn would tell him how she had washed little Georgie's shirttaking advantage of a warm day when he could run about nakedhow her mother had lamentable hard pains all down her back, how her father had got drunk at the harvest supper and tried to beat her.
THREE:"Perhaps now you have enough boys?" he said rather truculently.
THREE:Evening came, the dusk fell, stars floated up out of[Pg 347] the mists that piled themselves along the shore, the bleat of sheep came from the marsh, and the eye of Dungeness Lighthouse flashed off the Point into the fogs. Inland the country was wrapt in a tender haze, perfumed with hops and harvest. The moon rose above the Fivewatering, and bronzed the dark masses of wood huddling northward. The scented wind seemed to sigh to him of a woman's hair and lips, of the softness of a woman's hand in his, of her silly little voice talking love and nonsense. But the house in Wish Ward was shut to himperfidious woman had added yet another perfidy to her score. For about the twentieth time his love dream had been shattered. Now she was eating pickled herrings with another man.
THREE:"No! no! no!" from a hundred voices, overpowered the address of John Ball.
THREE:She wished, with all the wormwood that lies in useless regrets, that she had never married. Then, paradoxically, she would not have been so utterly alone. She would have had at least the help of sweet memories undefiled. She could have taken refuge in them from her sorrow, built them perhaps at last into hope. Now she had to thrust them from her, for they were one and all soiled by her unfaithfulness.