There on the rising of that cliff in imagination is the place to see her with the full sweep of Bridnorth bay and that wide open sea below and all the heathered stretches of the moors behind her. There, had they carved a statue for her in rough stone, you must have seen at once the beauty that she had.
But because it was in stone her beauty lay and not in pink white flesh that makes a fool of many a man, they had the less of mercy for her. Because it was in stone, man found her cold of touch and stood away. And yet again because it was in stone, once molten with the heat of life, there was no hand in little Bridnorth that could have stayed her fate.
Once stirred, the little pettiness of Bridnorth folk charred all like shavings from the plane at touch of her. Once stirred, she had in her passion to defy them every one. Once stirred, herself could raise that monument to the birthright of women which, in fancy, as her tale is read, will be seen there over Bridnorth on the high cliff's edge.
II
Hannah, Jane, Fanny and Mary, these were the four sisters of the Throgmorton family in the order of their respective ages. A brother they had, but he comes into no part of this history. The world had taken him when he was twenty-three. He left Bridnorth, the mere speck upon the map it was and, with the wide affairs of life at his touch, the mere speck it became in his memory. Stray letters reached Mary, his favorite sister. Read aloud at the breakfast table, they came, bringing strange odors of the world to those four girls. Vague emotions they experienced as they heard these infrequent accounts of where he was and what he did.
Silently Fanny's imagination would carry her to the far places he wrote of. Into the big eyes she had would rise a haze of distance across which an untrained vision had power vaguely to transport her. Hannah listened in a childish wonder. Jane made her sharp comments. It was Mary who said--
"Why do men have the real best of it? He'll never come back to Bridnorth again."
He never did come back. From the time their father and mother died they lived in Bridnorth alone.
Theirs was the square, white early Victorian house in the middle of the village through which the coach road runs from Abbotscombe to King's Tracey.
That early Victorian house, the furniture it contained, the narrow strip of garden in front protected from the road by low iron palings so that all who passed could see in the front windows, the unusually large garden at the back surrounded by a high brick wall, all these composed the immediate atmosphere in which Mary and her three sisters had been brought up from childhood.