“I can’t move,” said Sarah Brown.

“Sit there then,” said the fairies, and passed on, tickling but not uprooting the weeds in their rows.  Fairies are never ill.  They have immortal bodies, but no souls.  If they see you in pain, they simply think you are flaunting your superiority and your immortal soul in their faces.

The dragon undulated up the field.  “Very nicely hoed,” he said, looking vaguely at Sarah Brown’s row.  “Much better than the other rows.  Having your dinner?  Quite right too.”

He never noticed the twenty-five unhoed beans.

Sarah Brown sat on the edge of a shore of green shadow, and a sea of sun speckled with buttercups was before her.  David Blessing came and leaned against her.  His first intentions were good, he kissed her hurriedly on the chin, but after that he kissed the sandwich bag.

Sarah Brown wondered whether she could cut her throat with a hoe.

“Suicide while of sound mind,” she said.  “The said mind being entirely sick of its unsound body.”

If she sat absolutely still and upright the pain was bearable.  But even to think of movement brought tears of pain to her eyes.  She detached her mind from her predicament, and sank into a warm tropical sea of thought.  She was no real thinker, but she thought much about thinking, and was passionately interested in watching her own mind at work.  Thought was like sleep to her, she sank deeply into it without reaching anything profound, nothing resulted but useless dreams, and a certain comforting and defiant intimacy with herself.

She thought of Richard, and wished that she could have hoed a blessing into every bean of his that she had hoed.  She noted half-consciously and without surprise that the thought of him was beautiful to her.  She could not conjure up his face before her mind, because she always forgot realities, and only remembered dreams.  She could not imagine the sound of his voice, she could not recall anything that he had said.  Yet she felt again the magic feeling of meeting him, and dreamt of all the things that might have happened, and that might yet happen, yet never would happen, between him and her.  All the best things that she remembered had only happened in her dreams, her imagination no sooner sipped the first sip of an experience than it conjured up for her great absurd satisfying draughts of nectar, for which the waking Sarah Brown might thirst in vain.  But there was no waking Sarah Brown.  Her life was only a sleep-walking; only very rarely did she awake for a moment and feel ashamed to see how alert was the world about her.

So she thought of Richard, not of Richard’s Richard, but of some pale private Richard of her own.

The approach of Richard upon a white horse for some time seemed only an extension of her dream.  It was only when she realised that he was riding up her bean-row, and partially undoing the work of her hoe, that she awoke suddenly with a start, and caught and tore her breath upon a pin of pain.