Far from the schoolroom where she taught, in the channel between hedges, and a cold wind, a lack of confidence was what she regretted most. Regretted also the occasions when she had tossed her own momentary self-possession into the circle of pimply young men who jumped at the sound of a teaspoon on its cup. The wind drove the spirit from her face, made the circulation dwindle in her toes. Willy, she said numbly. As if this would help. At three o’clock, she had said, if this was the Sunday, in the Swaffham lane. If she had stayed in her room, at least she could have cried, face down on the crocheted quilt made by Miss Emmy Spalding as a girl. It’s a clean room, as you see, said Miss Emmy Spalding, showing her in that first day. We’ve had teachers before, said Miss Spalding, they was all very content. Miss Spalding then went out of the room leaving the teacher behind. She was a teacher, she told herself, with a little start of amazement, of fear, for she was no different in the glass, unchanged from the face that swept directionless on a wave of Swinburne in the room at home. And still directionless, the teacher in the lane, in spite of official mornings at a raised table watching her own superior hands underline in red ink, she was the blown grass in country lanes. On Sunday you’ll come to tea, he said. Sooner or later. Father’s all right, he said, it’s Mother. Mrs Standish, she composed already in her head, Mrs Standish, I hope you won’t mind, I hope you won’t mind if Willy, you see it is like this, it is like this, it is like. If Willy could hold her hand. If you could write the necessary on a pad and offer it between smiles, avoid the pitfalls of a trembling voice. Kitty, he said, it’s all right, we’re as good as married, he said, this is one of those formalities, they mean nothing, but after all. But after all, she was a schoolteacher, she was the daughter of Edwin Goose, a free-thinking, socialist, Norwich harness maker, she was an object for condescension, in spite of the theories her father taught, which were all very well for the kitchen at home, for the intellectual talks of the S.A.L. But they offered no assistance in the practical business of social intercourse. I am a snob, she admitted dejectedly. I am a teacher and a snob. Altogether she felt dejected, standing there in her common furs, waiting for someone who did not come.

Then she heard, or thought she heard, through wind and tree, with a tightening of the hands, the first detached echo of a hoof. It came rattling, bouncing, the clop-clop, the scattered stone. The little brown mare, blowing out her pink nostrils, preceded by her own spray. And then a face, you focused, below a cap, worn a bit too much on one side, with the smile that always struck you like the unexpected and left you out of breath. Forgetting if her hair, if the hat were respectable, she dissolved in gratitude.