“She’s the eldest of a large family.  At the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barns Farm.  I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant’s wife, and saw that girl there for the first time.  Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon.  I don’t know what induced me to notice her at all.  There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost.  The only peculiarity I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which passes away with the first word.  When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest.  She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender to every living creature.  She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith’s grey parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination.  Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime.  For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith’s well-known frivolousness, was a great recommendation.  Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in difficulties.  If it’s true, as some German fellow has said, that without phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination.  She had some.  She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by pity.  She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

“How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery.  She was born in the village, and had never been further away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford.  She lived for four years with the Smiths.  New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields, hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men about the farm, always the same—­day after day, month after month, year after year.  She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile.  Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large grey hat trimmed with a black feather (I’ve seen her in that finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles,