behemoth,--she felt almost like a sylph. She looked up frankly, and with
a sense of growing comfort, into his broad face where a good strong
growth of chestnut beard was bursting through his ruddy cheeks and
swirling abundantly beneath his nose. She looked up higher, to his wide
forehead, where a big shock of confident hair rolled and tumbled about
with careless affluence. And with no great shyness she appraised his
hands and his feet--those strong forceful hands that had dominated the
lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely
tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up blackly
to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender girlhood--that
remote, incredible time--was on her once more.

"I shall never feel large again," she said.

How right she was! Nobody ever felt large for long when Abner Joyce
happened to be about.




V

Abner regarded Mrs. Pence and her magnificence with a sombre intensity,
far from ready to approve. He knew far more about her than she could know
about him--thanks to the activities of a shamefully discriminating (or
undiscriminating) press--and he was by no means prepared to give her his
countenance. Face to face with her opulence and splendour he set the
figure of his own mother--that sweet, patient, plaintive little presence,
now docilely habituated, at the closing in of a long pinched life, to
unremitting daily toil still unrewarded by ease and comfort or by any