Between their donkeys strode a bare-legged woman in a ragged petticoat. She was bronzed and wrinkled, with straggling hair thrust through with a silver arrow, and coarse brown chemise falling widely open over an unlovely neck and breast. She uttered many a strident yell, accentuated by heavy thwacks of her club upon her donkeys' flanks. She was dirty, wild-eyed and hideous. It were as difficult to imagine her comely and young as to believe this little dried-up old girl had not been a flirting old maid from her cradle.
Ah, but Nature is cruel to woman! Freshness and beauty of flesh are hers, not that she may rejoice in her own beauty and freshness, but that she may become the mother of men. Bearing children, in the bearing dies one beauty and charm after another, just as trees die, leaf by leaf, which have enriched the world by their allotted harvests. Childless, her beauty and freshness die of her unfruitfulness, while Nature's pet offspring, man, waxes strong and proud years after all her leaves have fallen.
Look at these three people: the handsome and robust bachelor was the oldest of them all.
"What a capital model she would make for an Erinnys hunting Orestes to his fate!" thought Miss Deane.
She was bumping up and down in her saddle like a rubber ball. Nevertheless, in the pauses of those bumps she had time enough to grow very angry at something she saw. She turned a regular Spitzenberg red as she detected the searching, passionate gaze her companion bent upon every pretty islander they met. She saw the black-eyed girl with a huge bundle of fagots on her head, the brown-eyed one with immense building-timbers pressing down her curly locks, the blue-eyed one with copper water-jar gleaming goldenly over her dagger-thrust braids, smile significantly after coquettishly returning his gaze.
They are not so guileless as one might think, those picturesque, brown-skinned island-girls. Too many foreign artists have come this way, and too many strong-limbed, full-chested girls have become first their models, then mothers of their children, and then their wedded wives, not now-a-days to look upon every gazing forestiere as a possible husband, or at least lover.
Yet is it true that not one of them dreamed of the feeling beneath that immaculately-laundried shirt-bosom as the wearer turned away from them, one girl after another. Why should they, forsooth? Had not even Ben Shaw's own friends always declared there was no sentiment in him, or even in his pictures?
At one of her donkeys' stumbles over the lava-stones the driver yelled so horribly in Miss Deane's ears that that lady's discomfort puckered her face up like a frozen apple.
Mr. Shaw saw it. "By Jove!" he remarked to his donkey, who laid back its ears and pretended to understand English, "I must have been very veally ever to find that face pretty! But there's one thing sure: she has taken on a thousand girlish airs and graces with every year she has lived since then."
Poor Annie! Not an air or a grace had she more than fifteen years before. And how was she to know that she was too old for a girl's ways, she who had never ceased to be a girl to become wife and mother?