What would the hot, close, fevered pressure of life in the world give her that was half so good as that? How much better to dwell so, between the green grass and the wide sky, than to court the fickle homage and the fleeting loves of men! How much better if all her years could pass so on the peaceful breast of the kindly earth, living to lead her children out amongst the swaths of hay and teach them to love the lark's song and the face of the fields as she loved them! How much better to be Baucis than Aspasia!
Perhaps! but where was Philemon?
As the thoughts drifted through his mind she paused to whet her scythe, looked up, and saw him. With a smile that was as glad as sunshine in May weather she came towards him, leaping lightly over the hillocks of mown grass. She was happy to see him there. She felt no embarrassment for her bare arms and her kilted skirt; she had not been taught the immodesty of prudes.
'No, we will not go in the house,' he said to her when he had greeted her. 'Let us stay in your sweet-smelling meadow. Why are you mowing? Are there no mowers to do it?'
'I like doing it,' she answered; 'and it spares Madame Chabot the day's pay of a man. I can mow very well,' she added, with that pride in her pastoral skill which she had been imbued with on Bonaventure.
She walked on by his side through the little narrow spaces of mown ground which ran between the waves of the fallen grasses. She had pulled down her sleeves and taken the pins out of her skirt, and passed with her firm light tread and her uncovered head over the rough soil, with the afternoon sun in her eyes and on the rich tints of her face. It intensified the radiance of her colouring, as it did that of the scarlet poppies which were blowing here and there where the grass still stood uncut.
'What did he say of me?' she asked anxiously and wistfully, as Othmar walked on in silence beside her.
'He says you have not deceived yourself.'
'Ah!'—she drew a deep breath of relief—'I pleased him, then? And yet, when I heard him recite, it seemed to me that I could do nothing more than stutter and gabble foolishly; his voice was music——'