This, then, was a period of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday
was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the
hill. On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated
upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in
her lap. Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her apron over
the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing. Loveday was
hurt rather than angered by the unkind action, for there was a reason,
connected with Primrose, why she had felt a tender curiosity as to what
the two girls were guarding so closely. Yet she was aware of bitterness
also--for it was ever so when she appeared. Maids ceased their gossip,
boys laughed and pointed after her. She was "different."
Not in being a love-child, there were plenty of them in the village, but
their parents generally married later, and even if they did not, then
the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women
about whom other people talk so much.... She would live by the harbour
plying a trade which allowed her to have a love-child or so without it
being an occasion for undue remark, or, if she did not descend to those
depths where no one expects anything better and censure consequently
ceases through ineffectiveness, then at least everyone knew the author
of her fall to be an honest, loutish Englishman, no worse than most of
his neighbours.
Loveday was without either of these two rights to existence.
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