She wore a coat and skirt, with sleeves of last year’s cut. Her hat was trimmed with strict attention to fashion, and yet bore the brand “home-made.” There was a crisp new veil tied about the brim.
She smacked so of cities that the few people she met turned round to slowly gape at her, and a couple of small girls coming home from the village shop laughed aloud in her angry face.
She walked slowly along the white road, stopping now and then to lift her veil and wipe her burning cheeks.
The scenery was beautiful—with the characteristic beauty of the Sussex Weald. But she did not notice: she was too preoccupied. Her own affairs were in a critical state, and when one is anxious there is small consolation in undulating hills, long stretches of pasture, and red-roofed farmhouses. Her attitude was quite cockney—prim regard for her shoes and half-contemptuous admiration of her surroundings predominated.
Once she stopped to rest. A thatched and plastered cottage stood empty under the shadow of huge oaks. Wide green glades wound into the very heart of a little wood. The turf, inch-deep in moss, yielded like down. It was irresistible. She threw herself flat on her back, settling her skirt smoothly under her, and looked lazily through the wide mesh of the veil at the sky. The heat and the perfect silence almost made her sleep. A trap went by full of gayly-dressed country girls; a young man, hideous in his Sunday clothes, was driving. They were all off to some festivity, and they looked curiously at the prone figure on the turf. At first they thought it was some tramp, but the thin-soled morocco shoes stuck out from the dusty skirt contradicted that assumption. Such vagrant ways these town folk had! They laughed derisively, and the sound roused her. She sat up and stared a trifle vaguely at the watchful hills, the glades of the wood, the white, winding ribbon of highroad. Then she rose and whisked her skirt and went on again.
Only once more was she tempted to stop—at a bramble bush where the blackberries were loose and juicy. She drew up her veil to her nose and drew them off the stalks with widely parted lips, because she was anxious not to soil the fingers of her gloves. It was so necessary to make a good impression: the woman who could always make a good impression had the world at her feet.
She crossed a common; fowls were scratching and shaking their wings in the mounds of dust; a long string of geese waddled by, conversing volubly, and with evident arrogance. A man with a timber wagon came toward her, and she stopped him to ask the way. He told her that she had a mile or more to go.
She went on, her feet dragging at every step. At every step she grew more nervous, more undecided. She took a letter from her pocket and read it over twice. She stopped, half turned back. Her face was violent red and chalk-white in turn. Still she went on, with lagging, heavy feet and a queer, terrified shame and excitement at her heart: went on over that open common which was just beginning to flush with heather. Another man came by, driving a black pig. It grunted, and seemed to run in every direction but the right one. He looked a stupid man; but, then, they were all half-witted in the country. She said—very slowly and deliberately, as if she were speaking to a small child—that she wanted Folly Corner. He gave a vacillating grin, keeping one eye on the pig, and pointed to a substantial stack of chimneys on the left.
“That be Folly,” he said laconically, and left her.
She could see the house through the dense leafage of three great elms. She stood, with one hand firmly gripping her gay parasol, and the other twitching at the crisp edge of her veil. She looked at the red gables, at the spreading outbuildings, at the garden, at the yard; she looked back at the hot road cutting across the common. Should she go back or should she go on? For a moment she closed her eyes, and immediately the dark, straight wall of the prison shot up slowly like a specter and chilled her.