Fatal to romance in the minds of the fastidious, fatal to respectability in those of the common people, for only foreigners sold onions.  Strange men with rings in their ears and long, dark curls like a woman’s, and an eye that was at once bold and soft.

Loveday the younger had that eye, save that it had never learned from life to be bold, and her face was milken white instead of showing the blown roses of the other girls, though the back of her slender neck was stained a faint golden brown as by the inherited memories of sun.  She was most immodestly “different,” and even the Vicar’s lady, who had charitably seen to her baptism, had difficulty in bringing herself to believe the girl could be a Christian.

Cherry and Primrose stared up at her as she stood with the red jar in her hand, and, seeing her look so black, so white, so thin, they leant their yellow heads together and drew their two aprons closely over their plump laps.

Seen thus, fronted by Loveday, they seemed amazingly alike, because of the completeness of her differing, yet a longer look showed that, in spite of their sleek, fair heads and rounded shoulders, there was between them the deepest division there can be between women.

Cherry was a maid, thoughtless, blowsy, still untouched enough for wonder; Primrose had been a wife, though only seventeen, these three months; in another three was to be a mother.  Her eyes, blue as her friend’s, showed an even greater assurance, because it was based on positives and not on a mere negation.  Dark-circled as those eyes were, her glance, as it passed over Loveday, was the more merciless, because it came from behind the shelter of a ring-fence.

    Chapter II:  In which the onion-SELLER’S
      daughter for the first time feels as
      A woman

Chapter II

IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER’S DAUGHTER FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A WOMAN

For all her woodland timidity, Loveday was prone to those flashes of temper to which the weak in defence and the strong in feeling seem peculiarly exposed.  She snatched the shielding apron back from the lap of the buxom Cherry, stamping her foot the while.  Cherry, too amazed to protect her treasure, stared, slack-mouthed.

Primrose flew into a temper that surpassed Loveday’s, already failing her through dismay at her own action, even as the thunder, to children, surpasses in terrifying quality the lightning....  And, had they but known it, Primrose’s sounding tantrums held as much possibility of danger, compared with Loveday’s rage, as holds the crash compared with the flash.  But they knew it not, and already Loveday stood panting a little and spent with her own storm, while Primrose gathered herself, undaunted, for the attack.

A hail of words would have beaten about Loveday’s drooping head had not Cherry, all unwitting, come to the rescue with a cry on the discovery that her treasures, thus disturbed, had fallen to the ground, which was muddy enough, owing to the habit of the cattle of trampling the soil around the stiles.