CHAPTER IV


After her father's death Marcella had more time to become aware of the
really tangible shadows about the farm. In fact, she wakened to a
general awareness about the time of her eighteenth birthday, rather
later than most girls.

She was extraordinarily young; she was inevitably romantic. Living what
amounted to the life of a recluse, it was only to be expected that she
should live her illusions and dreams. Her mind was a storehouse of
folklore, romance, poetry and religion; her rationalistic readings had
not in any way become part of her, though facts and ratiocinations, by
mere feat of memory, were stored in her mind as irrelevances and
unrealities that came elbowing their way through her dreams just as
fantastic thoughts come as one falls asleep.

Never, in all her life, had she known what physical pleasure was; her
bed was hard and very thinly covered--one night her father had taken
away and locked up a blanket because he said she must be hardened. It
had never occurred to her that food could be a pleasure; it was just
something that happened, a recurrence of potatoes, porridge, oatcake and
broth. Only when she had been swimming in the fierce waves or battling
in the winds on Ben Grief with Wullie did she realize the pleasure of
hunger, and that was easily satisfied in the smoking hut when the
Hunchback raked aside the ashes and brought out roast potatoes or
toasted fish that he took down from the roof.

Not knowing other girls she had no one to talk to her about clothes.