and flattered by all the men when she had gone to the dock-yard, for she was a delicate, rather proud child. She rememered the funny old mistress, whose assistant she had become, whom she had loved to help in the private school. And she still had the Bible that John Field had given her. She used to walk home from chapel with John Field when she was nineteen. He was the son of a well-to-do tradesman, had been to college in London, and was to devote himself to business.
She could always recall in detail a September Sunday afternoon, when they had sat under the vine at the back of her father’s house. The sun came through the chinks in the vine-leaves and made beautiful patterns, like a lace scarf, falling on her and on him. Some of the leaves were clean yellow, like yellow Hat flowers.
“Now sit still,” he had cried. “Now your hair, I don’t know what it is like! It’s as bright as copper and gold, as red as burnt copper, and it has gold threads where the sun shines on it. Fancy their saying it’s brown. Your mother calls it mouse-colour.”
She had met his brilliant eyes, but her clear face scarcely showed the elation which rose within her.
“But you say you don’t like business,” she pursued.
“I don’t. I hate it!” he cried hotly.
“And you would like to go into the ministry,” she half implored.
“I should. I should love it, if I thought I could make a first-rate preacher.”
“Then why don’t you—why don’t you?” Her voice rang with defiance. “If I were a man, nothing would stop me.”
She held her head erect. He was rather timid before her.
“But my father’s so stiff-necked. He means to put me into the business, and I know he’ll do it.”
“But if you’re a man?” she had cried.
“Being a man isn’t everything,” he replied, frowning with puzzled helplessness.
Now, as she moved about her work at the Bottoms, with some experience of what being a man meant, she knew that it was not everything.
At twenty, owing to her health, she had left Sheerness. Her father had retired home to Nottingham. John Field’s father had been ruined; the son had gone as a teacher in Norwood She did not hear of him until, two years later, she made determined inquiry. He had married his landlady, a woman of forty, a widow with property.
