"But don't you think so now? Yes, you do."
Silence—the sort that gives consent. And the silence of a young, spontaneous embrace.
Jack was on tenterhooks. He wanted to be gone. But Mary was persisting, in her obstinate voice—he wished she'd shut up too.
"I wanted to be a sailor at ten, and an explorer at twelve. At nineteen I wanted to become a painter of wonderful pictures." Jack wished she wouldn't say all this. "And then I had' a streak of humility, and wanted to be a gardener. Yet——" she laughed, "not a sort of gardener such as Aunt Matilda hires. I wanted to grow things and see them come up out of the earth. And see baby chicks hatched, and calves and lambs born."
She had lifted her hand from Jack's sleeve, to his relief.
"And marry a farmer like Tom," he said roughly. Mary received this with dead silence.
"And drudge your soul away like Mrs. Ellis," said Rackett. "Worn out before your time, between babies and heavy housework. Groping on the earth all your life, grinding yourself into ugliness at work which some animal of a servant-lass would do with half the effort. Don't you think of it, Miss Mary. Let the servant-lasses marry the farmers. You've got too much in you. Don't go and have what you've got in you trampled out of you by marrying some cocky farmer. Tom's as good as gold, but he wants a brawny lass of his own sort for a wife. You be careful, Miss Mary. Women can find themselves in ugly harness, out here in these god-forsaken colonies. Worse harness than any you've ever kicked against."
Monica seemed to have scented the tense atmosphere under the barn, for she appeared like a young witch, in a whirlwind.
"Hullo, Mary! Hullo, Dr. Rackett! It's just on midnight." And she flitted over to Grace. "Just on midnight, Grace and Alec. Are you coming? You seem as if you were fixed here."
"We're not fixed on the spot, but we're fixed up all right, otherwise," said Alec, in a slight tone of resentment, as he rose from Grace's side.