"O, never mind where you ought to be," he cried, pouring out the coffee, "that's where you are, you suit the place, you brighten and adorn it, it's your native setting, Kate. No—I know exactly what is running in your mind, you are going to ask if I suffer loneliness here. Well, I don't. A great art in life is the capacity to extract a flavour from something not obviously flavoured, but here it is all flavour. Come and look at things."
He rose and led her from egg and toast to the world outside. Long fields of pasture and thicket followed a stream that followed other meadows, soon hidden by the ambulating many-folding valleys, and so on to the sea, a hundred miles away. Into his open door were blown, in their season, balls of thistledown, crisp leaves, twigs and dried grass, the reminder, the faint brush, of decay. Airs of wandering winds came in, odours of herbs, the fragrance of viewless flowers. The land in some directions was now being furrowed where corn was greenly to thrive, to wave in glimmering gold, to lie in the stook, to pile on giant stack. Horses were trailing a harrow across an upland below the park, the wind was flapping the coats of the drivers, the tails and manes of the horses, and heaving gladly in trees. A boy was firing some heaps of scutch grass and the smoke wore across the land in dense deliberate wreaths. Sportsmen's guns were sounding from the hollow park.
Kate followed Masterman around his cottage; he seemed to be fascinated by the smoke, the wind, the horses and men.
"Breakfast will be cold."
How queerly he looked at her before he said: "Yes, of course, breakfast will be getting cold," and then added, inconsequently: "Flowers are like men and women, they either stare brazenly at the sun or they bend humbly before it: but even the most modest desire the sun."
When he spoke like that she always felt that the words held a half-hidden, perhaps libidinous, meaning, which she could not understand but only guess at; and she was afraid of her guesses. Full of curious, not to say absurd, superstitions about herself and about him, his strange oblique emotions startled her virginal understanding; her desire was to be good, very very good, but to be that she could not but suspect the impulses of most other people, especially the impulses of men. Well, perhaps she was right: the woman who hasn't any doubts must have many illusions.
He carried a bag of lunch and they walked out into the day. Soon the wind ceased, the brightness grew warm, the warmth was coloured; clouds lolled in the air like tufts of lilac. At the edge of a spinney they sat down under a tree. Boughs of wood blown down by the winter gales were now being hidden by the spring grass. A rabbit twenty yards away sat up and watched the couple, a fat grey creature. "Hoi!" cried Kate, and the rabbit hopped away. It could not run very fast, it did not seem much afraid.
"Is it wounded?" she asked.
"No, I think it is a tame one, escaped from a farm or a cottage near us, I expect."
Kate crept after it on hands and knees and it let her approach. She offered it the core of an apple she had just eaten. The rabbit took it and bit her finger. Then Kate caught it by the ears. It squealed but Kate held it to her bosom with delight, and the rabbit soon rested there, if not with delight at least with ease. It was warm against her breast. It was delicious to feel it there, to pull its ears and caress its fat flank, but as she was doing this she suddenly saw that its coat was infested with fleas. She dropped the rabbit with a scream of disgust and it rushed into the thicket.