Going about the rough barnlot of the farm above Rock Creek, calling in the hens, breaking them corn, Ellen would merge with Nellie in the long memory she had of her from the time when she had called from the fence with so much prettiness, through the numberless places she had lived or stayed and the pain she had known, until her mother’s life merged into her own and she could scarcely divide the one from the other, both flowing continuously and mounting. Or hearing Hen’s foxhorn, a hoarse note without music, a rough throaty call, she would wonder that the swift cry of a horn had once gone into her like a glad spear, and she would penetrate her own history, into memories long habitually forgotten. It had seemed forever that she had travelled up and down roads, having no claim upon the fields but that which was snatched as she passed. Back of that somewhere in a dim darkened dream like a prenatal vision, she saw a house under some nut trees, a place where she lived, but as clearly seen as this she could see her brother Davie and the others, the more shadowy forms of the older children although all of them were dead before she was born. So that this house with the odour about it of nut shells was all embedded now in the one dream that extended bedimmed into some region where it merged with Nellie’s memories. Life began somewhere on the roads, travelling after the wagons where she had claim upon all the land and no claim, all at once, and where what she knew of the world and what she wanted of it sparkled and glittered and ran forward quickly as if it would always find something better. Down one road and up another and down again, and the woman she called Tessie West always went ahead, but at each journey’s end she herself would run to Tessie’s wagon where it was hitched beside the road. She tried to think then what might have come to Tessie in all the years that had passed and how she would seem now and how look, but there was no way to think of her except as something brightly shining and diffused through the years of the roads and through the roads themselves. She could not clearly see how Tessie looked although she remembered her sitting beside her log fire one night and remembered her dull coat and her red and blue headscarf. ‘If I met Tessie on the road,’ she thought, ‘I’d maybe not know it. Even if I met her as she was then without e’er change in her look,’ and she thought of this sadly for a little while. ‘Or maybe if I knowed her now I’d say what a durned fool woman that is, to talk eternally about tom-foolery, God knows!’ But this thought she denied any place although it lasted in spite. ‘She might come in that-there door or she might already ’a’ come, any day, and I, maybe, said, “What a no-account wearisome woman, God knows!” It might be that way.’