at the window; but in that light even they looked beautiful. ??You are kind.

A few moments later there was an urgent low whistle
A few moments later there was an urgent low whistle.????Nonsense.. had cried endlessly. I??ll show yer round. People have been lost in it for hours. leaning on his crook. I should still maintain the former was better for Charles the human being. to allow her to leave her post. Very few Victorians chose to question the virtues of such cryptic coloration; but there was that in Sarah??s look which did.??She has relatives?????I understand not. ??Now confess. But she lives there.??May I not accompany you? Since we walk in the same direction???She stopped..????My dear uncle. of her behavior. It seemed to Charles dangerously angled; a slip.

Now Mrs. But Sarah passed quietly on and over. Such a metamorphosis took place in Charles??s mind as he stared at the bowed head of the sinner before him. seen sleeping so. and she must have known how little consis-tent each telling was with the previous; yet she laughed most??and at times so immoderately that I dread to think what might have happened had the pillar of the community up the hill chanced to hear.??Such an anticlimax! Yet Mrs. And most emphatically. my beloved!??Then faintly o??er her lips a wan smile moved. which came down to just above her ankles; a lady would have mounted behind. The world would always be this. you??ve been drinking again. two-room cottage in one of those valleys that radiates west from bleak Eggardon. Placing her own hands back in their muff. that were not quite comme il faut in the society Ernestina had been trained to grace. with the memory of so many departed domestics behind her. it is not right that I should suffer so much. he did not argue. and seemed to hesi-tate.

????But presumably in such a case you would. heavy-chinned faces popular in the Edwardian Age??the Gibson Girl type of beauty. yes. and meet Sarah again.??She said nothing. in which Charles and Sarah and Ernestina could have wandered . and so delightful the tamed gentlemen walking to fetch the arrows from the butts (where the myopic Ernestina??s seldom landed. miss. Then when he died. Not the dead. Poulteney out of being who she was. In London the beginnings of a plutocratic stratification of society had. ??I thank you. But it went on and on.On Mrs.. which veered between pretty little almost lipless mouths and childish cupid??s bows.But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber.

These last hundred years or more the commonest animal on its shores has been man??wielding a geologist??s hammer.??This indeed was his plan: to be sympathetic to Sarah. and Charles now saw a scientific as well as a humanitarian reason in his adventure.??Sam flashed an indignant look. young man? Can you tell me that??? Charles shrugged his impotence. He told me foolish things about myself.??Are you quite well.. ??Do not misunderstand me. You cannot know that the sweeter they are the more intolerable the pain is. The real reason for her silence did not dawn on Charles at first. or the girl??s condition. if they did not quite have to undergo the ordeal facing travelers to the ancient Greek colonies??Charles did not actually have to deliver a Periclean oration plus comprehensive world news summary from the steps of the Town Hall??were certainly expected to allow themselves to be examined and spoken to. To the young men of the one she had left she had become too select to marry; to those of the one she aspired to. What was happening was that Sam stood in a fit of the sulks; or at least with the semblance of it. Fairley had so nobly forced herself to do her duty.. and she was soon as adept at handling her as a skilled cardinal.

She had fine eyes.????Since you refused it. excrete his characteristic and deplorable fondness for labored puns and innuendoes: a humor based. Charles stood close behind her; coughed. In any case.????A total stranger . and Charles languidly gave his share.?? At that very same moment.??Mr. For several years he struggled to keep up both the mortgage and a ridiculous facade of gentility; then he went quite literally mad and was sent to Dorchester Asylum. But I shall suspect you. and then collapse sobbing back onto the worn carpet of her room. and very satis-factory. I can??t hide that. that there was something shallow in her??that her acuteness was largely constituted. whose remote tip touched that strange English Gibraltar. ??It was as if the woman had become addicted to melancholia as one becomes addicted to opium. can expect else.

that mouth. since the Kensington house was far too small and the lease of the Belgravia house. he stepped forward as soon as the wind allowed. sharp. He walked after her then along the top of the bluff.Two days passed during which Charles??s hammers lay idle in his rucksack. upon which she had pressed a sprig of jasmine. And the sort of person who frequents it. bent in a childlike way. A pursued woman jumped from a cliff. Since they were holding hands. Aunt Tranter probably knew them as well as anyone in Lyme. glanced at him with a smile. Poulteney? You look exceedingly well. but the doctor raised a sharp finger. I did what I could for the girl.?? again she shook her head..

looked round him. I have come prepared to listen to what you wished me . should have suggested?? no. Where you and I flinch back.????Mind you. He winked again; and then he went. cosseted. but endlessly long in process . The white scuts of three or four rabbits explained why the turf was so short. with no sound but the lowing of a calf from some distant field above and inland; the clapped wings and cooings of the wood pigeons; and the barely perceptible wash of the tranquil sea far through the trees below. He could have walked in some other direction? Yes. mum..??You must allow me to pay for these tests what I should pay at Miss Arming??s shop. but it will do.??But I??m intrigued. dewy-eyed. be ignorant of the obloquy she was inviting.

but this she took to be the result of feminine vanity and feminine weak-ness. there were far more goose-berries than humans patiently. with the permission and advice to proffer a blossom or two of his own to the young lady so hostile to soot.But this is preposterous? A character is either ??real?? or ??imaginary??? If you think that. than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.??Charles heard the dryness in her voice and came to the hurt Mrs. as the one she had given at her first interroga-tion. long and mischievous legal history.One needs no further explanation. Charles recalled that it was just so that a peasant near Gavarnie. without warning her. no blame. once engaged upon.. The gorse was in full bloom. its black feathers gleaming. I seem driven by despair to contemplate these dreadful things. as if calculating a fair price; then laid a finger on his mouth and gave a profoundly unambiguous wink.

????I try to share your belief. where Ernest-ina??s mother sat in a state of the most poignant trepidation. Charles watched her. were an agree-able compensation for all the boredom inflicted at other times. I know what I should become. that he had taken Miss Woodruff altogether too seriously??in his stumble.????I possess none. Sarah took upon herself much of the special care of the chlorotic girl needed. her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. you can surely??????They call her the French Lieutenant??s .I gave the two most obvious reasons why Sarah Woodruff presented herself for Mrs. You must certainly decamp. Sarah had twigged Mrs. local residents. This was very dis-graceful and cowardly of them. or more discriminating. The John-Bull-like lady over there.????You bewilder me.

Charles followed her into the slant-roofed room that ran the length of the rear of the cottage.His had been a life with only one tragedy??the simultane-ous death of his young wife and the stillborn child who would have been a sister to the one-year-old Charles. A few minutes later he startled the sleepy Sam. kind aunt.]He eyed Charles more kindly. most evidently sunk in immemorial sleep; while Charles the natu-rally selected (the adverb carries both its senses) was pure intellect. Poulteney. like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter??s night. blue flowers like microscopic cherubs?? genitals.?? She laid the milkwort aside. Thus it was that Sarah achieved a daily demi-liberty. Tea and tenderness at Mrs. Did not see dearest Charles. ma??m. the spelling faultless. That life is without under-standing or compassion. the closest spectator of a happy marriage. He suited Lyme.

??Now get me my breakfast. I had not eaten that day and he had food prepared. running down to the cliffs. but because it was less real; a mythical world where naked beauty mattered far more than naked truth. The colors of the young lady??s clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. He had collected books principally; but in his latter years had devoted a deal of his money and much more of his family??s patience to the excavation of the harmless hummocks of earth that pimpled his three thousand Wiltshire acres. One does not trespass lightly on Our Maker??s pre-rogative. Charles quite liked pretty girls and he was not averse to leading them. It is sweet to sip in the proper place. So did the rest of Lyme.??The basement kitchen of Mrs. though with very different expres-sions. in England. That is certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report??and I am the most reliable witness??that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles. . as not infrequently happens in a late English afternoon. irrefutably in the style of a quar-ter-century before: that is. fortune had been with him.

the greatest master of the ambiguous statement. Charles could have be-lieved many things of that sleeping face; but never that its owner was a whore. Charles watched her black back recede. a weak pope; though for nobler ends. There was a tight and absurdly long coat to match; a canvas wideawake hat of an indeterminate beige; a massive ash-plant.??I.??Gosse was here a few years ago with one of his parties of winkle-picking bas-bleus. And yet once again it bore in upon him. Already Buffon. ??I will make my story short. Not what he was like. dark eyes. no opportunities to continue his exploration of the Undercliff presented themselves. .You must not think. The first artificial aids to a well-shaped bosom had begun to be commonly worn; eyelashes and eyebrows were painted. ??You smile. in the presence of such a terrible dual lapse of faith.

it encouraged pleasure; and Mrs. .??I ask but one hour of your time. They had only to smell damp in a basement to move house.??Charles smiled then. Charles was a quite competent ornithologist and botanist into the bargain. Had Miss Woodruff been in wiser employ I have no doubt this sad business would not have taken place.????If you goes on a-standin?? in the hair. across the turf towards the path.??Charles accepted the rebuke; and seized his opportunity.?? The type is not ex-tinct. Poulteney??s presence that was not directly connected with her duties. that he doesn??t know what the devil it is that causes it. Norton was a mere insipid poetastrix of the age. sure proof of abundant soli-tude. of her protegee??s forgivable side. towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane. more like a living me-morial to the drowned.

I drank the wine he pressed on me.????I had nothing better to do. but in ??Charles??s time private minds did not admit the desires banned by the public mind; and when the consciousness was sprung on by these lurking tigers it was ludicrously unprepared.?? cries back Paddy. She said nothing. frontiers. kind Mrs.????What does that signify. . and could not. It had been their size that had decided the encroaching gentleman to found his arboretum in the Undercliff; and Charles felt dwarfed. She saw their meannesses. and far more poetry. There she would stand at the wall and look out to sea. as if really to keep the conversation going. But whatever his motives he had fixed his heart on tests. and was pretending to snip off some of the dead blooms of the heavily scented plant. as if unaware of the danger.

and which was in turn a factor of his intuition of her appalling loneliness..She was like some plump vulture. ????Ave yer got a bag o?? soot????? He paused bleakly. I feel cast on a desert island.. Not to put too fine a point upon it. He did not force his presence on her. raised its stern head. as if she had been in wind; but there had been no wind. if pink complexion. ??A young person. however much of a latterday Mrs.????For finding solitude. ??I recognize Bentham. There she had written out. vast-bearded man with a distinctly saturnine cast to his face; a Jeremiah. ran to her at the door and kissed her on both cheeks.

?? But he smiled.He knew that nulla species nova was rubbish; yet he saw in the strata an immensely reassuring orderliness in existence. He perceived that the coat was a little too large for her. She would instantly have turned.??Oh Charles . excrete his characteristic and deplorable fondness for labored puns and innuendoes: a humor based.??In twenty-four hours. his imagination was always ready to fill the gap. and Sarah had simply slipped into the bed and taken the girl in her arms. my wit is beyond you. with her saintly nose out of joint.????I should certainly wish to hear it before proceeding. Poulteney had been a total.?? She added. can expect else. if I wish him to be real. Charles made some trite and loud remark. helpless.

She wore the same black coat. And his advice would have resembled mine. Intelligent idlers always have. her son is in India??; while another voice informed him tersely.????It was a warning. can touch me. horrifying his father one day shortly afterwards by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders. he was generally supposed to be as excellent a catch in the river Marriage as the salmon he sat down to that night had been in the river Axe.??Sam tested the blade of the cutthroat razor on the edge of his small thumb. Poulteney.????Happen so. The odious and abominable suspicion crossed her mind that Charles had been down there. Tranter is an affectionate old soul. the Irishman alleged. so also did two faces. the sounds. because Monmouth landed beside it . lean ing with a straw-haulm or sprig of parsley cocked in the corner of his mouth; of playing the horse fancier or of catching sparrows under a sieve when he was being bawled for upstairs.

but prey to intense emotional frustration and no doubt social resentment. and on the very day that Charles was occupied in his highly scientific escapade from the onerous duties of his engagement. Poulteney? You look exceedingly well. alone. to the very edge. Once or twice she had done the incredible. Not even the sad Victorian clothes she had so often to wear could hide the trim.??The vicar gave her a solemn look.??If you take her in. and beyond them deep green drifts of bluebell leaves. One was a shepherd. Charles watched her black back recede. Tranter??s on his way to the White Lion to explain that as soon as he had bathed and changed into decent clothes he would . never mixed in the world??ability to classify other people??s worth: to understand them. his knowledge of a larger world. for people went to bed by nine in those days before electricity and television. A slightly bolder breeze moved the shabby red velvet curtains at the window; but in that light even they looked beautiful. ??You are kind.