“D’you want it now?”
“I don’t know.” She dragged the words out wide-apart. “And yet I do know; but I’ve no right to allow it.”
“You silly child, why on earth not?”
“I’m inconstant; I’m like that now. I should make you happy first and sorry afterwards.”
“I’ll risk it. I made you sorry first and now I’m going to make you happy.”
“Do you think you are?”
“Sure of it.”
The road began to descend, at first gradually. The bare, tilled uplands where winter lingered, were left behind and we ran through a sheltered land of orchards. The air pulsated with the baaing of lambs and the sweet yearning of fecundity. Under blown spray of fruit-trees the little creatures gamboled, halting by fits and starts, calling to their mothers, or kneeling beneath them, their thirsty throats stretched up and their long tails flapping. Surrounded by lean trees, lopped of their lower branches, gray farmhouses rose up, watching like aged shepherds. Slowfooted cattle, heavy-uddered, wandered between the hedges with their great bags swinging. Women with brass jars on their shoulders, which narrowed at the neck like funeral urns, walked through the meadows to the milking.
“Do we turn or go on?”
“Go on.”