You figure the old woman's steadfastly tremulous advance, the bundle
clutched in her gnarled lank hand, her nose (which was her countenance)
wrinkled with breathless resolution. You see the poppies nodding
fatefully on her bonnet, and the dust-white spring-sided boots beneath
her skimpy skirts, pointing with an irrevocable slow alternation east
and west. Beneath her arm, a restive captive, waggled and slipped a
scarcely valuable umbrella. What was there to tell the Vicar that this
grotesque old figure was--so far as his village was concerned at any
rate--no less than Fruitful Chance and the Unforeseen, the Hag weak men
call Fate. But for us, you understand, no more than Mrs. Skinner.

As she was too much encumbered for a curtsey, she pretended not to see
him and his friend at all, and so passed, flip-flop, within three yards
of them, onward down towards the village. The Vicar watched her slow
transit in silence, and ripened a remark the while....

The incident seemed to him of no importance whatever. Old womankind,
_aere perennius_, has carried bundles since the world began. What
difference has it made?

"We are out of it all," said the Vicar. "We live in an atmosphere of
simple and permanent things, Birth and Toil, simple seed-time and simple
harvest. The Uproar passes us by." He was always very great upon what he
called the permanent things. "Things change," he would say, "but
Humanity--_aere perennius_."

Thus the Vicar. He loved a classical quotation subtly misapplied. Below,
Mrs. Skinner, inelegant but resolute, had involved herself curiously
with Wilmerding's stile.