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Updated: June 27, 2025
With Nicky's absorption into the Army and Vassie's incursion hard upon the edge of her final parting Ishmael was more strangely affected than by anything that had happened merely to himself in his whole life. The approach of death for Vassie, the perpetual chance of it for Nicky, gave him the fulness of life, in so far as life means the power to feel.
Vassie was enthusiastic about the idea, and soon the house was in a ferment with preparations; bottles of cider were brought out, a stone puncheon of beer produced for the men, cakes and pasties began to form beneath Vassie's willing hands. Ishmael felt a pang as he watched her. How could it affect her but adversely, this change he was to make?
Flynn were a man to whom Vassie's beauty outweighed her defects, and if it were nothing but that with him, then was the outlook for her ultimate happiness poor; but she was her own mistress and had to be judge of that. At least she had not deceived him, for there came a postscript to the rather worldly raptures. "P.S. He knows about it all, and says it does not matter; what he wants is me."
On a sunlit day, one of those March days which, in Cornwall, can hold a sudden warmth borrowed from the months to come, they all three sat upon the grass of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little screams, Vassie's wide skirts had had to be squeezed and pulled through the dark underground "rooms" of a dead people.
Still, as the days slipped past, he found himself looking forward more and more keenly. On the afternoon before he was to go to town he was resting on a couch in his room when the sounds of Vassie's arrogant but not unpleasing voice came floating up to him from the parlour as she sang her latest song, the fashionable "Maiden's Prayer."
Blanche leant up alongside her stook and Vassie sat watching her, while Judy, who had seen a wistful look on Phoebe's baby face, drew her into such superficial personal talk as she could best compass. "When do you go back to London?" was Vassie's abrupt and not very happy opening.
Phoebe did want to; she had shown all her heart so plainly in that cry genuine in that she believed it herself; and Phoebe was kind and perilously sweet.... The days went on, and Vassie's letter of argument and protest was less determined than it would have been if she herself had not been engrossed in her own affairs.
A slight thickness of modelling here and there, notably in the short nose and too-rounded chin, blurred the fineness of her beauty and might make for hardness later on, but now, at twenty-one, Vassie's wonderful skin and her splendid assurance were too dazzling for criticism to look at her and live.
Killigrew had played the game quite fairly according to his code; it was Vassie's ignorance of any form of philandering beyond the crude interchange of repartee and kisses of the young clerks she had hitherto met that had made the playing of it unequal.
The sun that had gilded Vassie's head had sunk swiftly by the time they reached the mill; and when the miller opened to their knock a flood of lamplight came out to mingle with the soft dusk. Phoebe's mother had died some two or three years earlier, and since then the miller had lived with only an old aunt of his own to help him look after his daughter.
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