"Now, just the contrary. That always shows a young fellow who's
attending to his business. If he'd seen you boil potatoes, make
dumplings, beds, tea, all that, you'd have had a chance. He'd have
marched up to ye before you was off to London."

"Saying, 'You are the woman.'" Rhoda was too desperately tickled by the
idea to refrain from uttering it, though she was angry, and suffering
internal discontent. "Or else, 'You are the cook,'" she muttered, and
shut, with the word, steel bars across her heart, calling him, mentally,
names not justified by anything he had said or done--such as mercenary,
tyrannical, and such like.

Robert was attentive to her in church. Once she caught him with his eyes
on her face; but he betrayed no confusion, and looked away at the
clergyman. When the text was given out, he found the place in his Bible,
and handed it to her pointedly--"There shall be snares and traps unto
you;" a line from Joshua. She received the act as a polite pawing
civility; but when she was coming out of church, Robert saw that a blush
swept over her face, and wondered what thoughts could be rising within
her, unaware that girls catch certain meanings late, and suffer a fiery
torture when these meanings are clear to them. Rhoda called up the pride
of her womanhood that she might despise the man who had dared to distrust
her. She kept her poppy colour throughout the day, so sensitive was this
pride. But most she was angered, after reflection, by the doubts which
Robert appeared to cast on Dahlia, in setting his finger upon that
burning line of Scripture. It opened a whole black kingdom to her
imagination, and first touched her visionary life with shade. She was
sincere in her ignorance that the doubts were her own, but they lay deep
in unawakened recesses of the soul; it was by a natural action of her