'
'So you see,' she said, bending a little towards him, 'I shouldn't
make a very good companion.'
'But I could put up with it from you!' he cried. 'I could put up with
anything from you.'
She made a gesture. That was where he chiefly failed. The colossal
gentleman of her imagination was a tyrant.
* * * * *
She rode home, up and along the track, on to the high road with its
grass borders and across the shadows of the elm branches which striped
the road with black. It was a long road accompanied on one side and
for about two miles by a tall, smooth wall, unscalable, guarding the
privacy of a local magnate's park. It was a pitiless wall, without a
chink, without a roughness that could be seized by hands; it was
higher than Rose Mallett as she sat on her big horse and, but for the
open fields on the other side where lambs jumped and bleated, that
road would have oppressed the spirit, for the wall was a solid witness
to the pride and the power of material possession. Rose Mallett hated
it, not on account of the pride and the power, but because it was
ugly, monstrous, and so inhospitably smooth that not a moss would grow
on it. More vaguely, she disliked it because it set so definite a
limit to her path. She was always glad when she could turn the corner
and, leaving the wall to prolong the side of the right angle it made
at this point, she could take a side road, edging a wooded slope.
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