The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy

In the days of high-waisted and muslin-gowned women, when the vast amount / of soldiering going on in the country was a cause of much trembling to / the sex, there lived in a village near the Wessex coast two ladies of / good report, though unfortunately of limited means. The elder was a Mrs. / Martha Garland, a landscape-painter's widow, and the other was her only / daughter Anne.

Anne was fair, very fair, in a poetical sense; but in complexion she was / of that particular tint between blonde and brunette which is / inconveniently left without a name. Her eyes were honest and inquiring, / her mouth cleanly cut and yet not classical, the middle point of her / upper lip scarcely descending so far as it should have done by rights, so / that at the merest pleasant thought, not to mention a smile, portions of / two or three white teeth were uncovered whether she would or not. Some / people said that this was very attractive. She was graceful and slender, / and, though but little above five feet in height, could draw herself up / to look tall. In her manner, in her comings and goings, in her 'I'll do / this,' or 'I'll do that,' she combined dignity with sweetness as no other / girl could do; and any impressionable stranger youths who passed by were / led to yearn for a windfall of speech from her, and to see at the same / time that they would not get it. In short, beneath all that was charming / and simple in this young woman there lurked a real firmness, unperceived / at first, as the speck of colour lurks unperceived in the heart of the / palest parsley flower.

She wore a white handkerchief to cover her white neck, and a cap on her / head with a pink ribbon round it, tied in a bow at the front. She had a / great variety of these cap-ribbons, the young men being fond of sending / them to her as presents until they fell definitely in love with a special / sweetheart elsewhere, when they left off doing so. Between the border of / her cap and her forehead were ranged a row of round brown curls, like / swallows' nests under eaves.

She lived with her widowed mother in a portion of an ancient building / formerly a manor-house, but now a mill, which, being too large for his / own requirements, the miller had found it convenient to divide and / appropriate in part to these highly respectable tenants. In this / dwelling Mrs. Garland's and Anne's ears were soothed morning, noon, and / night by the music of the mill, the wheels and cogs of which, being of / wood, produced notes that might have borne in their minds a remote / resemblance to the wooden tones of the stopped diapason in an organ. / Occasionally, when the miller was bolting, there was added to these / continuous sounds the cheerful clicking of the hopper, which did not / deprive them of rest except when it was kept going all night; and over / and above all this they had the pleasure of knowing that there crept in / through every crevice, door, and window of their dwelling, however / tightly closed, a subtle mist of superfine flour from the grinding room, / quite invisible, but making its presence known in the course of time by / giving a pallid and ghostly look to the best furniture. The miller / frequently apologized to his tenants for the intrusion of this insidious / dry fog; but the widow was of a friendly and thankful nature, and she / said that she did not mind it at all, being as it was, not nasty dirt, / but the blessed staff of life.

By good-humour of this sort, and in other ways, Mrs. Garland acknowledged / her friendship for her neighbour, with whom Anne and herself associated / to an extent which she never could have anticipated when, tempted by the / lowness of the rent, they first removed thither after her husband's death / from a larger house at the other end of the village. Those who have / lived in remote places where there is what is called no society will / comprehend the gradual levelling of distinctions that went on in this / case at some sacrifice of gentility on the part of one household. The / widow was sometimes sorry to find with what readiness Anne caught up some / dialect-word or accent from the miller and his friends; but he was so / good and true-hearted a man, and she so easy-minded, unambitious a woman, / that she would not make life a solitude for fastidious reasons. More / than all, she had good ground for thinking that the miller secretly / admired her, and this added a piquancy to the situation.

On a fine summer morning, when the leaves were warm under the sun, and / the more industrious bees abroad, diving into every blue and red cup that / could possibly be considered a flower, Anne was sitting at the back / window of her mother's portion of the house, measuring out lengths of / worsted for a fringed rug that she was making, which lay, about three- / quarters finished, beside her. The work, though chromatically brilliant, / was tedious: a hearth-rug was a thing which nobody worked at from morning / to night; it was taken up and put down; it was in the chair, on the / floor, across the hand-rail, under the bed, kicked here, kicked there, / rolled away in the closet, brought out again, and so on more capriciously / perhaps than any other home-made article. Nobody was expected to finish / a rug within a calculable period, and the wools of the beginning became / faded and historical before the end was reached. A sense of this / inherent nature of worsted-work rather than idleness led Anne to look / rather frequently from the open casement.