’Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any emotional nature,’ said Grace.

Jane shook her head.  She knew a story of him contradicting that.

The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.  It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks early in the morning, after Grace had gone to London.  Miss Colesworth was coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in England.  Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous man of Letters who lived by the work of his pen.  She remembered comparing him to one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a ship to give him rest or land in view.  He had made a little money by a book, and was expending it on travels—­rather imprudently, she fancied Emma Colesworth to be thinking.  He talked well, but for the present she was happier in her prospect of nearly a week of loneliness.  The day was one of sunshine, windless, odorous:  one of the rare placid days of April when the pettish month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it till the end of the day.  The beech twigs were strongly embrowned, the larches shot up green spires by the borders of woods and on mounds within, deep ditchbanks unrolled profuse tangles of new blades, and sharp eyes might light on a late white violet overlooked by the children; primroses ran along the banks.  Jane had a maxim that flowers should be spared to live their life, especially flowers of the wilds; she had reared herself on our poets; hence Mrs. Lackstraw’s dread of the arrival of one of the minstrel order:  and the girl, who could deliberately cut a bouquet from the garden, if requested, would refuse to pluck a wildflower.  But now they cried out to her to be plucked in hosts, they claimed the sacrifice, and it seemed to her no violation of her sentiment to gather handfuls making a bunch that would have done honour to the procession of the children’s May-day—­a day she excused for the slaughter because her idol and prophet among the poets, wild nature’s interpreter, was that day on the side of the children.  How like a bath of freshness would the thick faintly-fragrant mass shine to her patient!  Only to look at it was medicine!  She believed, in her lively healthfulness, that the look would give him a spring to health, and she hurried forward to have them in water-the next sacred obligation to the leaving of them untouched.

She had reared herself on our poets.  If much brooding on them will sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than lead her into foolishness.  Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility, imaginative, yet idealistic, she had the complex character