She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as though
his talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in the past.

'But the country is not idleness,' she said, smiling at him. Her
cheek was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an unusual
animation; and her long white dress, guiltless of any ornament save
a small old-fashioned locket hanging from a thin old chain and a
pair of hair bracelets with engraved gold clasps, gave her the
nobleness and simplicity of a Romney picture.

'_You_ do not find it so I imagine,' he replied, bending forward
to her with a charming gesture of homage. He would have liked her
to talk to him of her work and her interests. He, too, mentally
compared her to Saint Elizabeth. He could almost have fancied the
dark red flowers in her white lap. But his comparison had another
basis of feeling than Rose's.

However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in which
she turned the conversation brought home to his own expansive,
confiding nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her
which for the moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about
the neighborhood, the people and their ways, the impression vanished
again, so far at least, as there was anything repellent about it.
Austerity, strength, individuality, all these words indeed he was
more and more driven to apply to her. She was like no other woman
he had ever seen. It was not at all that she was more remarkable
intellectually. Every now and then, indeed, as their talk flowed
on, he noticed in what she said an absence of a good many interests
and attainments which in his ordinary south-country women friends
he would have assumed as a matter of course.