ONE:The next day they left Odiam for the recruiting station at Rye. Reuben and the farm-hands watched them as they marched off whistling "Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you," shaking their shoulders in all the delight of their new freedom. They had goneas Albert had gone, as Robert, as Richard, as Tilly, as Benjamin, as Caro, as Pete had gone. Reuben stood erect and stiff, his eyes following them as they turned out of the drive and disappeared down the Peasmarsh road.
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ONE:What there was in either Reuben or Naomi to make a poet of their eldest son would be hard to say. Perhaps it was the glow of their young love, so golden and romantic during the first year of their marriage. If so, there was something of bitter irony in this survival and transmutation of it. Odiam was no place for poets, and Reuben tried by every means in his power to knock the poetry out of Albert. It was not the actual poetry he objected to so much as the vices which went with itforgetfulness, unpracticalness, negligence. Albert would sometimes lose quite half an hour's work by falling into a dream, he also played truant on occasions, and would disappear for hours, indeed now and then for a day or more, wandering in the fields and spinneys, tasting the sharp sweetness of the dawn and the earth-flavoured sleep of the night.He leaned towards her over the back of his chair.
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ONE:It never occurred to her to throw these young people together, and give the girl a chance of fighting her father and satisfying the vague longings for adventure and romance which had begun to put torment into her late twenties. She often told her it was a scandal that she had never been allowed to know men, but her own were too few and useful to be sacrificed to the forlorn. Besides, Caro had an odd shy way with men which sometimes made them laugh at her. She had little charm, and though not bad-looking in a heavy black-browed style, she had no feminine arts, and always appeared to the very worst advantage.
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