He
used to say Jane was a better worker than he, though she did it by fits
and starts, going at it sometimes as if every limb was iron and was
moved by a steam-engine, and then for days doing nothing, playing with a
neighbor's baby, sitting by the window, humming some old tune to
herself, in a way that even Andy thought idle and childish. For the
rest, he had thought little about her, except that she was a strangely
clean and silent woman, and kind, even to tenderness,--to him; but to
the very bats in the barn, or old Wart, or any other vermin, as well.
Perhaps an artist would have found more record in the brawny frame and
the tanned, chronicled face of the woman, as she bent over her work in
her gray dress in the fresh morning light. Forty years of hard, healthy
labor,--you could read that in the knotted muscles and burnt skin: and
no lack of strength in the face, with its high Indian cheek-bones and
firm-set jaws. But there was a curious flickering shadow of grace and
beauty over all this coarse hardness. The eyes were large, like the
cow's under yonder tree, slow-moving, absorbing, a soft brown in color,
and unreasoning; if pain came to this woman, she would not struggle, nor
try to understand it: bear it dumbly, that was all.
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