‘Goodbye, Ellen Chesser!’

‘Goodbye, Hank Seay!’

‘Come back again, Ellen Chesser.’

‘I will, Hank Seay.’

She passed over a little rise in the road and then down beyond his sight, answering his last calls.

‘I like you, Ellen Chesser.’

‘So do I like you, Hank Seay.’

After that the old horse continued to take the road in his own way and the midsummer roadside growth swam slowly before Ellen’s eyes. She began to weep. She took the sample of flowered cloth from her bosom and, without looking at it, let it drift from her fingers and fall wherever it would. With a passionless gesture she put it away from her. A dull nausea spread through her body and a sense of impending duty, a sorrow not yet realised. The fireflies made dull streaks of light beyond the water of her tears, scarcely seen. The cows would not be milked, her cows, until she came, unless Ben milked them for her, but when she thought of this, dwelling upon it, she was sure that Ben would milk for her, and Nellie would take home the turkeys. She passed the empty house where Dorine once had lived; the yard was now grown with weeds and the fences falling. Her eyes slid from one white stone to another as she passed on the road, and she found that she had been searching for the difference between Sallie Lou and herself, had been feeling the difference, whatever it was, feeling it in a mass and trying to resolve it into some clear statement. She looked at the difference with deeply penetrating thought, probing the mass and trying to bring it to some precise maxim, to resolve it to angles or edges, but it turned about, elusive and undefined. Sallie Lou held life lightly and held herself lightly, letting any winds blow over her, but over this came a picture of a cavern surrounded by quivering blood and moving flesh that peeled back until one saw its red inner part, Sallie Lou’s mouth. But these ideas faded and she was left again with the fog to penetrate. Sallie Lou was insolent and careless because she was happy, she thought, and then an image of her in a bright muslin dress, in numberless successions of bright dresses, Sallie Lou moving up and down in the dance, but she herself had moved lightly in dancing before Jonas had said he could not dance again; and she had been able to draw great tenderness to Jonas’s face with one appealing glance, asking for it. Jonas liked Sallie Lou because she had not seen him in the first hours of his suffering, she summarised at last. She seemed paralysed, incompetent to assume her grief in its whole. As she turned into the pasture at the gate she knew that she would be going here and there with Sebe until Jonas came back. She would ask Nellie to let her have another bright dress, she decided, and her mind set itself to contrive the dress, deciding, even while it busied itself elsewhere. All evening her voice trailed away, breaking its sentences and leaving the last of them unsaid, so great was her preoccupation with her confusion. She would somehow find a way to bring back the old relation, she thought for comfort; this was a shadow. It was a sickness, a great pain, but it would surely go. Jonas would remember.