[The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy]@TWC D-Link bookThe Woodlanders CHAPTER III 12/18
"And Giles Winterborne is not for me, and the less I think of him the better." She returned to her cottage.
The sovereigns were staring at her from the looking-glass as she had left them.
With a preoccupied countenance, and with tears in her eyes, she got a pair of scissors, and began mercilessly cutting off the long locks of her hair, arranging and tying them with their points all one way, as the barber had directed.
Upon the pale scrubbed deal of the coffin-stool table they stretched like waving and ropy weeds over the washed gravel-bed of a clear stream. She would not turn again to the little looking-glass, out of humanity to herself, knowing what a deflowered visage would look back at her, and almost break her heart; she dreaded it as much as did her own ancestral goddess Sif the reflection in the pool after the rape of her locks by Loke the malicious.
She steadily stuck to business, wrapped the hair in a parcel, and sealed it up, after which she raked out the fire and went to bed, having first set up an alarum made of a candle and piece of thread, with a stone attached. But such a reminder was unnecessary to-night.
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