Summer Will Show Read Online Free

road beyond. It would be hotter there, but the change of surroundings would free the current of her thoughts, fretting so uselessly round the fact of her husband.
    Here, when they had been driving to see the Duke, the barouche had passed a cluster of the villagers of Blandamer Abbotts, those who, being too childish or too infirm to walk to the route along which he would pass, had gathered about the gates of Blandamer House for the minor spectacle of the Squire and his Lady and the little Miss; and as the lodge gates had swung open a shrill fragmentary cheer had been raised. Papa bowed, Mamma bowed, Sophia bowed repeatedly until Papa had bidden her not to ape grand manners. A flush of confusion at the rebuke had been submerged in the more thorough flush of being suddenly tossed out into the full heat of the sun, and Mamma had put up a sunshade. Now the sun fell upon her with the same emphasis.
    Augusta said, “I think this road was nicer when the may was in bloom.”
    “Much nicer,” the boy replied. “And look at that chestnut tree. It is quite ugly now that there are no more flowers.”
    “I disdain July,” the girl remarked, with something of her mother’s decision.
    The chestnut trees grew at the north-west corner of the park, so massive that they completely dwarfed the heavy stone wall that bounded it. Under their bulk of foliage it shrank to the value of a wicker paling. In the July sun their green was dark and formidable. They have lost their flowers, thought Sophia. I like them better so. Her mind, clumsy at anything like a metaphor, dwelt heavy and slow on the trees, and under the shade of her straw bonnet she blinked her eyes as though dazzled. The chestnuts had outgrown their flowers, rather, and now stood up against the full strength of the summer, unbedizened, dark, castellated, brooding, given over to the concern of ripening their burden of fruit. Like me, exactly, she thought. I admire them, and I am glad to resemble them. I am done with blossoming, done with ornament and admiration. I live for my children — a good life, the life my heart would have chosen.
    Out here, where the road ran among the large swelling fields, it was as though one were in a different world from that bounded by the park wall. Only an occasional hedgerow elm or elder-bush shadowed the road. The grass banks were whitened with dust, and the flowers that grew there, chalk-white milfoil, and fever-few, looked like spattered handfuls of a thicker dust. The sun flashed on the flints in the fields, the loose straws on a rick glittered like shreds of glass. It was the landscape that Sophia had known all her life long. She liked it for acquaintance’ sake, but knew that it was ugly. The land was poor, its bones showed through, its long history of seed-time and harvest had starved it, it had the cowed ungainly outlines of a woman gone lean with over-much childbearing. Except for the park-lands of Blandamer House it was unwooded, and the hills where the sheep-walks lay had none of the dignity of proper hills, they were round-shouldered slouching hummocks. However, it was all familiar to her, and a considerable part of it belonged to her, and did its duty and was productive. Just as she desired a more respectable tenantry, Sophia might have desired a more suave and fertile landscape; but in the depth of her heart she knew that one was as unimprovable as the other, and the consciousness of having no illusions made her content with what she had.
    Now, by a thicket of elder and dog-roses, the path that led to the lime-kiln branched off. It ran on a grassy ridge between two fields. On the one side was a crop of barley, ripening well, but poor in straw. The poppies growing among it made the green of the barley seem almost sea-blue by contrast. On the other side was a turnip field. Two men were hoeing there, their hoes ringing against the flints. As the party from the house filed along the ridge the younger of the men turned round and came towards