My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it in with her milk, I suppose." "I know it isn't you fault, Molly, and yet, and yet---" She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his obtuseness.

As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck, rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust.

A sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a knife.
"I shouldn't mind your kissing me just once, if you'd like to, Abel," she said.
A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate self-reproach why she had yielded to pity?
She had felt sorry for Abel, and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her.

"Only I meant him to do it gently and soberly," she thought, "and he was so rough and fierce that he frightened me.

I suppose most girls like that kind of thing, but I don't, and I shan't, if I live to be a hundred.
I've got no belief in it--I've got no belief in anything, that is the trouble.