‘I’m ugly,’ she said, ‘and I might as well know it and remember. My hands are big and coarse and my skin is browned and redded in the wind. My eyes are slow and big, always a-looken at everything in the world and always expecten to see something more. My face looks like the ground and my back looks like ground with my old cloak pulled over it. I’m ugly. My hands, they’re ugly and my feet have got on big old shoes. My feet are like roots of trees. I look like a board and I look like a rough old pond in a pig pasture. I’ll remember. I’m ugly. Ugly. I’m ugly in the way I walk; sometimes a-goen fast and sometimes slow, scared-like. I might as well remember. No need for you to think about something pink to wear or something blue or yellow. No use to think about soft colours. You might as well wear one kind as another. Drab. Brown. Faded dark old shrunk-up anything is good enough. Why don’t you just give up and be ugly? That’s what you are. Ugly. That’s all.’

She went down the stairs slowly, beaten back upon herself. Out in the pasture she cut dandelions and wild mustard for greens for dinner, searching over the ground and cutting a bit here and there, wild lettuce and lambsquarter and a bit of narrow dock. A great load was gone from her body. She went lightly from place to place to search out the green herbs as they grew among the grass. No matter about her hands or her searching eyes or her heavy-shod feet. They did not have to be any other way. It was pleasant to bound lightly from place to place in cool green stuff and find out tender young green bits to cook for dinner. The sun and the ground and the herbs to eat, the herbs cut and dropped into her basket, to spring from one tuft to another on light-going arms and feet – that was a good way to be.