replied. "When I polish the pans"--she laughed--"and when I scour my
buckles, I just think of pans and buckles." She tossed up her fingers
lightly, with a perfect charm of archness.

He was very close to her now. "But girls have dreams, they have
memories."

"If women hadn't memory," she answered, "they wouldn't have much, would
they? We can't take cities and manoeuvre fleets." She laughed a little
ironically. "I wonder that we think at all or have anything to think
about, except the kitchen and the garden, and baking and scouring and
spinning"--she paused slightly, her voice lowered a little--"and the sea,
and the work that men do round us. . . . Do you ever go into a
market?" she added suddenly.

Somehow she could talk easily and naturally to him. There had been no
leading up to confidence. She felt a sudden impulse to tell him all her
thoughts. To know things, to understand, was a passion with her. It
seemed to obliterate in her all that was conventional, it removed her far
from sensitive egotism. Already she had begun "to take notice" in the
world, and that is like being born again. As it grows, life ceases to be
cliche; and when the taking notice is supreme we call it genius; and
genius is simple and believing: it has no pride, it is naive, it is
childlike.

Philip seemed to wear no mark of convention, and Guida spoke her thoughts
freely to him. "To go into a market seems to me so wonderful," she
continued. "There are the cattle, the fruits, the vegetables, the
flowers, the fish, the wood; the linen from the loom, the clothes that
women's fingers have knitted. But it isn't just those things that you