Women of the Country | Page 4

night. She
looked out into the lane. The cottage a little lower down had a light in
the window and here and there lights shewed along the road. The night
when one can no longer work out of doors matters little in the country,
yet the ample stillness with distant rustling sounds pleased her and she
lingered. Two young men carrying shapeless bundles on their shoulders
wished her good-night as they passed home from work. Everyone
seemed to have finished with out of doors. Even the cat from the yard
rubbed against her as it ran into the house, stealthily and crouching as if
in fear. She turned indoors and lit the lamp, fastened the door with a
wooden bolt and drew the blind before the diamond-paned window.
CHAPTER III
Anne Hilton was one of those women who have so little knowledge of
the practical thoughts of those round about them, that they pass their
lives half-disliked, partly respected, and mostly avoided. She had lived
alone now for two years, her father, whom she had nursed, having died
of the saddest human malady. He had ("as anyone might have had with
such a daughter," declared the neighbours), harboured a great contempt
for women, and though, being uninclined to tread the heights himself,
he feared his daughter's uprightness of character, he had never lost an
occasion of pouring scorn on her unpractical ways.
"Can you take it home for me, James?" would ask a neighbour, handing
up a case of eggs to the cart, where James sat preparing to leave the

market.
"There's no women in the cart," James would reply, and supposed he
had given the required assent.
The "round-about ways of doing things," which had been the butt of her
shrewd old father, had brought upon Anne a customary air of
half-readiness, so that going in suddenly, she might be found with her
bonnet on and her handkerchief on the table, but one perceived she was
still in her petticoat, and was making a pie for dinner. Meals, indeed,
she considered as things to be got out of the way, both her own, and, to
their expressed discomfort, those of other people. She herself often ate
them as she went about her work, pausing to take a spoonful from a
plate on the table or from the saucepan itself.
Taking the Scripture as the literal rule of the smallest details of her life,
she never wore a mixture of wool and cotton, as that was forbidden to
the Jews, nor would she wear any imitation of linen for the same reason.
In consequence, her clothes, which were of sound material, never
looked common, but always out-of-date.
She could be got (not that many people had tried to do so) to do
nothing quite like other people, not from perversity as some readily
declared, or a desire to "be different," but from inability to acquire the
point of view from which the most ordinary actions are done. She took
no money on Sunday, and this becoming known to her ne'er-do-well
neighbours, they made a point of forgetting to come for milk on
Saturday.
"You must tell your mother I never sell milk on Sunday."
"Yes, Miss Hilton."
"I'll give you a little to go on with, but next week you must come for it
on Saturday."
And the child, having got what she wanted, would run off with the jug
of milk and the money which should have paid for it, to repeat exactly

the same offence the following week. Her reputation for queerness let
her be considered fair game, and so convinced is the ordinary person
that queerness is of necessity contemptible, that when she did anything
which was unusual, its reason was never examined, nor did the
possibility that it might be better done in that way occur to anybody. It
was merely a new evidence of her oddity.
But it was especially in those points in which she felt herself moved by
her religious convictions that she was most suspected. For in spite and
over all her eccentricities of belief, she was genuinely religious, having
the two great religious virtues, charity in judgment and sorrow for the
failures of others. But again she was "different," as it is evident in this
world that the failures of other people are entirely their own fault, and
to be gentle in judgment is more than other people will be to you, and
therefore unnecessary. So that, without being in intention a reformer,
she suffered the suspicion and dislike of the reformer, being, in fact,
however she might disguise it, "different" from other people.
This constant clashing with the steadfast ideas of every one had in time
produced a timidity and secretiveness in the most ordinary actions,
though where she believed herself to