Henry stuffed more wood into the little stove and presently the boy took down his small hands which he had been holding up to the warmth and looked about with drowsy eyes. The girl stayed by the door, refusing a seat on a wooden box by the stove. She said her name was Effie Turpin. She answered the questions asked her with meagre half-phrases, eyeing Henry and Ellen minutely. She lived down the river, a long way to go. She had been to see if Miss Tod wanted any weaving. She did not come often. The boy was seven. She must go. Yes, it was cold. She had told Sam it would be cold. He had grown out of his overcoat. Ellen looked at her from time to time as she stood by the door, swaying as she stood, wavering against the brown wood. Her flesh was dull and life crept slowly under her sunburnt skin, but it was there, moving her eyes and staring in her face that searched out the ways of the stripping room, probing Henry and Ellen for ways. The girl said she must go but she lingered on. Ellen saw herself in Effie Turpin’s body, as it stood by the door wavering. She saw herself standing there, half of her afraid, unable to go when she knew she must, held by the other persons until she was unable to reach up her hand to the latch string, the other half of her bold, jerking out brief bold answers. The flesh under Effie Turpin’s eyes was her own flesh and Effie Turpin’s rough cold hands were her own as they shrank from the latch and lay over each other jerkily before the brown coat that was pulled tightly across the girl’s chest. Ellen tore off the leaves carefully and laid them in their piles, a joy in her being because someone had come, another, almost herself but separate in body, a girl her own age. Wanting the girl to stay, she asked her a question now and then to keep her. Finally the girl went uneasily out at the door, jerking through the partly opened doorway quickly, and the child ran in fright after her.

Or Ellen sat in the house by the open fire drying her wet shoes. Around the house outside was mud, wet, and dripping eaves. Inside clothes were drying by the fire and the cabin was filled with soapy steam in which floated the odour of human bodies. Up the stairs, and the walls were wet from the leaking roof and the figures on the wall sank away into darker brown as in a fog, the procession endlessly going – trees, women, letters, women, crosses, unfeathered birds, swords, demons. Out of doors there was slop and mud to the ankles, cow dung and slush, deeper in the low places by the pond and deeper again in the cowpens. In the morning she would go up the hill in the dripping wet and her feet would sop in and out of the slow mire. She would help milk the cows under the shed and another day would be upon her, more mud, more wet, days endlessly going alike to every other, each one. Suddenly out of the still air of the dusk she felt a kiss on her face and arms gathered close to her shoulders.