Forgetting thousand leagues of sea."


Perhaps she was in the very town I was leaving behind. Perhaps
we had slept within a few houses of each other. Who could tell?


Looking back at the old town, with its one steep street climbing
the white face of the chalk hill, I remembered what wonderful
exotic women Thomas Hardy had found eating their hearts out
behind the windows of dull country high streets, through which
hung waving no banners of romance, outwardly as unpromising of
adventure as the windows of the town I had left. And then
turning my steps across a wide common, which ran with gorse and
whortleberry bushes away on every side to distant hilly horizons,
swarthy with pines, and dotted here and there with stone granges
and white villages, I thought of all the women within that
circle, any one of whom might prove the woman I sought,--from
milkmaids crossing the meadows, their strong shoulders straining
with the weight of heavy pails, to fine ladies dying of ennui in
their country-houses; pretty farmers' daughters surreptitiously
reading novels, and longing for London and "life;" passionate
young farmers' wives already weary of their doltish lords;
bright- eyed bar-maids buried alive in country inns, and
wondering "whatever possessed them" to leave Manchester,--for
bar-maids seem always to come from Manchester,--all longing
modestly, said I, to set eyes on a man like me, a man of romance,
a man of feeling, a man, if you like, to run away with.