One day, as we trotted out of a large village into a shady bit of road, I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes in the windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch.  Kennedy pulled up to a walk.  A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a line stretched between two old apple-trees.  And as the bobtailed, long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the left hand, covered by a thick dog-skin glove, the doctor raised his voice over the hedge:  “How’s your child, Amy?”

I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to take in the squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a tight knot at the back of the head.  She looked quite young.  With a distinct catch in her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.

“He’s well, thank you.”

We trotted again.  “A young patient of yours,” I said; and the doctor, flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, “Her husband used to be.”

“She seems a dull creature,” I remarked listlessly.

“Precisely,” said Kennedy.  “She is very passive.  It’s enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind—­an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises of imagination.  And yet which of us is safe?  At any rate, such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love.  She’s the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd; the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father—­a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life.  But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of their characters.  There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads—­over all our heads. . . .”

The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant horizon of the sea.  The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen.  From the edge of a copse a waggon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.  Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportions.  And the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on the background of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness.  The end of his carter’s whip quivered high up in the blue.  Kennedy discoursed.