Women of the Country | Page 4

the country, yet the ample stillness with distant rustling sounds pleased her and she lingered. Two young men carrying shapeless bundles on their shoulders wished her good-night as they passed home from work. Everyone seemed to have finished with out of doors. Even the cat from the yard rubbed against her as it ran into the house, stealthily and crouching as if in fear. She turned indoors and lit the lamp, fastened the door with a wooden bolt and drew the blind before the diamond-paned window.
CHAPTER III
Anne Hilton was one of those women who have so little knowledge of the practical thoughts of those round about them, that they pass their lives half-disliked, partly respected, and mostly avoided. She had lived alone now for two years, her father, whom she had nursed, having died of the saddest human malady. He had ("as anyone might have had with such a daughter," declared the neighbours), harboured a great contempt for women, and though, being uninclined to tread the heights himself, he feared his daughter's uprightness of character, he had never lost an occasion of pouring scorn on her unpractical ways.
"Can you take it home for me, James?" would ask a neighbour, handing up a case of eggs to the cart, where James sat preparing to leave the market.
"There's no women in the cart," James would reply, and supposed he had given the required assent.
The "round-about ways of doing things," which had been the butt of her shrewd old father, had brought upon Anne a customary air of half-readiness, so that going in suddenly, she might be found with her bonnet on and her handkerchief on the table, but one perceived she was still in her petticoat, and was making a pie for dinner. Meals, indeed, she considered as things to be got out of the way, both her own, and, to their expressed discomfort, those of other people. She herself often ate them as she went about her work, pausing to take a spoonful from a plate on the table or from the saucepan itself.
Taking the Scripture as the literal rule of the smallest details of her life, she never wore a mixture of wool and cotton, as that was forbidden to the Jews, nor would she wear any imitation of linen for the same reason. In consequence, her clothes, which were of sound material, never looked common, but always out-of-date.
She could be got (not that many people had tried to do so) to do nothing quite like other people, not from perversity as some readily declared, or a desire to "be different," but from inability to acquire the point of view from which the most ordinary actions are done. She took no money on Sunday, and this becoming known to her ne'er-do-well neighbours, they made a point of forgetting to come for milk on Saturday.
"You must tell your mother I never sell milk on Sunday."
"Yes, Miss Hilton."
"I'll give you a little to go on with, but next week you must come for it on Saturday."
And the child, having got what she wanted, would run off with the jug of milk and the money which should have paid for it, to repeat exactly the same offence the following week. Her reputation for queerness let her be considered fair game, and so convinced is the ordinary person that queerness is of necessity contemptible, that when she did anything which was unusual, its reason was never examined, nor did the possibility that it might be better done in that way occur to anybody. It was merely a new evidence of her oddity.
But it was especially in those points in which she felt herself moved by her religious convictions that she was most suspected. For in spite and over all her eccentricities of belief, she was genuinely religious, having the two great religious virtues, charity in judgment and sorrow for the failures of others. But again she was "different," as it is evident in this world that the failures of other people are entirely their own fault, and to be gentle in judgment is more than other people will be to you, and therefore unnecessary. So that, without being in intention a reformer, she suffered the suspicion and dislike of the reformer, being, in fact, however she might disguise it, "different" from other people.
This constant clashing with the steadfast ideas of every one had in time produced a timidity and secretiveness in the most ordinary actions, though where she believed herself to be directed by the Spirit, she had no lack of confidence and determination. If her movements could be kept secret she would do her utmost to make them so. She would send the reply to an invitation to tea half over the country before it reached its destination. Yet she would often pray