The innocent eyes and mobile mouth are singularly
childlike. This peculiarity is the more striking when we
consider the figure. This is not fully developed according to
the accepted standards the hips are too small, the chest too
narrow and flat, the arms too thin. True or false, the idea
is formed of a woman of a childlike, affectionate nature, but
lacking in passion, one to be chosen for a sister rather than
a wife. Something in us - instinct or tradition - will have it
that the well-developed woman is richest in the purely womanly
qualities - the wifely and maternal feelings. The luxuriant
types that abound most in Devonshire are not common here.
It will be understood that the women described are those that
live in cottages. Here, as elsewhere, as you go higher in the
social scale - further from the soil as it were - the type
becomes less and less distinct. Those of the "higher class,"
or "better class," are few, and always in a sense foreigners.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Troston
I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from
towns and railroads, will have any literary associations for
the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good
memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of
the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names
of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple
of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a
branch of it, flowing between them.
