She laid them side by side, flower to flower and stalk to stalk, caressing them for walking alone.

Flowers and even pebbles in the earth had their own life and disposition, and brought back the feelings of a child to whom they were companions.

Looking up, her eye was caught by the line of the mountains flying out energetically across the sky like the lash of a curling whip.

She looked at the pale distant sky, and the high bare places on the mountain-tops lying exposed to the sun.

When she sat down she had dropped her books on to the earth at her feet, and now she looked down on them lying there, so square in the grass, a tall stem bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon, while the mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun.