"He's well, thank you."
We trotted again. "A young patient of yours," I said; and the doctor, flicking the chest-nut absently, muttered, "Her husband used to be.""She seems a dull creature," I remarked list-lessly.
"Precisely," said Kennedy. "She is very pas-sive. It's enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, prom-inent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind --an inertness that one would think made it ever-lastingly safe from all the surprises of imagina-tion. And yet which of us is safe? At any rate, such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love. She's the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd; the beginning of his misfortunes dating from his runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father--a well-to-do, apoplectic grazier, who passionately struck his name off his will, and had been heard to utter threats against his life.
But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the simi-larity of their characters. There are other trage-dies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads--over all our heads. . . ."The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen. From the edge of a copse a waggon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.
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