Chapter 4 - Page 2

more.

Of Henchard they heard nothing. To the liege subjects of
Labour, the England of those days was a continent, and a
mile a geographical degree.

Elizabeth-Jane developed early into womanliness. One day a
month or so after receiving intelligence of Newson's death
off the Bank of Newfoundland, when the girl was about
eighteen, she was sitting on a willow chair in the cottage
they still occupied, working twine nets for the fishermen.
Her mother was in a back corner of the same room engaged in
the same labour, and dropping the heavy wood needle she was
filling she surveyed her daughter thoughtfully. The sun
shone in at the door upon the young woman's head and hair,
which was worn loose, so that the rays streamed into its
depths as into a hazel copse. Her face, though somewhat wan
and incomplete, possessed the raw materials of beauty in a
promising degree. There was an under-handsomeness in it,
struggling to reveal itself through the provisional curves
of immaturity, and the casual disfigurements that resulted
from the straitened circumstances of their lives. She was
handsome in the bone, hardly as yet handsome in the flesh.
She possibly might never be fully handsome, unless the
carking accidents of her daily existence could be evaded
before the mobile parts of her countenance had settled to
their final mould.

The sight of the girl made her mother sad--not vaguely but
by logical inference. They both were still in that strait-
waistcoat of poverty from which she had tried so many times
to be delivered for the girl's sake. The woman had long
perceived how zealously and constantly the young mind of her
companion was struggling for enlargement; and yet now, in
her eighteenth year, it still remained but little unfolded.
The desire--sober and repressed--of Elizabeth-Jane's heart
was indeed to see, to hear, and to understand. How could
she become a woman of wider knowledge, higher repute--
"better," as she termed it--this was her constant inquiry of
her mother. She sought further into things than other girls
in her position ever did, and her mother groaned as she felt
she could not aid in the search.

The sailor, drowned or no, was probably now lost to them;
and Susan's staunch, religious adherence to him as her
husband in principle, till her views had been disturbed by
enlightenment, was demanded no more. She asked herself
whether the present moment, now that she was a free woman
again, were not as opportune a one as she would find in a
world where everything had been so inopportune, for making a
desperate effort to advance Elizabeth. To pocket her pride
and search for the first husband seemed, wisely or not, the
best initiatory step. He had possibly