“Yes,” it replies, “just the ghost of the world.”
She turned unhappily and looked back across the gateway into the fair combe with its cattle, its fine grass, and the man working diligently therein. A sense of bleak loneliness began to possess her; here, then, was no difference save that there were no correlations, no consequences; nothing had any effect except to produce the ghost of a ghost. There was already in the hinterland of her apprehensions a ghost, a ghost of her new ghostship: she was to be followed by herself, pursued by figures of her own ceaseless being!
She looked at the one by her side: “Who are you?” she asked, and at the question the group of men drew again very close to them.
“I am your unrealized desires,” it said: “Did you think that the dignity of virginhood, rarely and deliberately chosen, could be so brief and barren? Why, that pure idea was my own immaculate birth, and I was born, the living mate of you.”
The hungry-eyed men shouted with laughter.
“Go away!” screamed Clorinda to them; “I do not want you.”
Although they went she could hear the echoes of their sneering as she took the arm of her new lover “Let us go,” she said, pointing to the man in the combe, “and speak to him.” As they approached the man he lifted his ladder hugely in the air and dashed it to the ground so passionately that it broke.
“Angry man! angry man!” mocked Clorinda. He turned towards her fiercely. Clorinda began to fear him; the muscles and knots of his limbs were uncouth like the gnarl of old trees; she made a little pretence of no more observing him.
“Now what is it like,” said she jocularly to the angel at her side, and speaking of her old home, “what is it like now at Weston-super-Mare?”
At that foolish question the man with the ladder reached forth an ugly hand and twitched the scarf from her shoulders.