showering us with light and heat. We have no spring suns; our sun,
even in December, is a summer one.

And so, with all its grace of curve and bend, and so--the description
is longer than the voyage--we come to our first stopping-place. To the
side, in front of the well-kept fertile fields, like a proud little
showman, stood the little house. Its pointed shingle roof covered it
like the top of a chafing-dish, reaching down to the windows, which
peeped out from under it like little eyes.

A woman came out of the door to meet us. She had had time during our
graceful winding approach to prepare for us. What an irrevocable
vow to old maidenhood! At least twenty-five, almost a possible
grandmother, according to Acadian computation, and well in the grip
of advancing years. She was dressed in a stiff, dark red calico gown,
with a white apron. Her black hair, smooth and glossy under a varnish
of grease, was plaited high in the back, and dropped regular ringlets,
six in all, over her forehead. That was the epoch when her calamity
came to her, when the hair was worn in that fashion. A woman seldom
alters her coiffure after a calamity of a certain nature happens
to her. The figure had taken a compact rigidity, an unfaltering
inflexibility, all the world away from the elasticity of matronhood;
and her eyes were clear and fixed like her figure, neither falling,
nor rising, nor puzzling under other eyes. Her lips, her hands, her
slim feet, were conspicuously single, too, in their intent, neither
reaching, nor feeling, nor running for those other lips, hands, and
feet which should have doubled their single life.

That was Adorine Mérionaux, otherwise the most industrious Acadian and
the best cottonade-weaver in the parish. It had been short, her story.