It was not yet warm enough for her to sit in her nook; it was doubtful if she would have done so if the weather had been sufficiently propitious.  The reason for her present indifference to the spot, which she had always loved, was that it bordered the Avon, and just now the river was swollen and turbulent with spring rains.  Her soul ached for companionship with something stable, soothing, still.  Perhaps this was why she preferred to walk by the canal that touched Melkbridge in its quiet and lonely course.  The canal had a beauty of its own in Mavis’ eyes:  its red-brick, ivy-grown bridges, its wooden drawbridges, deep locks, and deserted grass-grown tow-paths were all eloquent of the waterways having arrived at a certain philosophic repose, which was in striking contrast to the girl’s unquiet thoughts.  Soon, as if in celebration of spring, both banks were gay with borders of great yellow butter-cups.  It seemed to Mavis as if they decorated the tables of a feast to which she had not been asked.  The great awakening in the heart of life proceeded exquisitely, inevitably.  Mavis believed that, as the sun’s rays had no real meaning for her, it was only by some cruel mischance that she was enabled to bear witness to their daily increasing warmth.  She would tell the troubles of her disturbed mind to Jill, who tried to show her sympathy by licking her face.  At night, she would often waken out of a deep sleep with a start, when her eagerly outstretched arms would grasp a vast emptiness.  The sight of lovers walking together would bring hot blood to her head; the proximity of a young man would make her heart beat strangely.

She frequently found herself wondering why intercourse between man and woman was hedged about by innumerable restrictions.  It seemed to her that what people called the conventionalities were a device of the far-seeing eye of the Most High to regulate the relations of His children.  If any of these appeared to escape the ends for which they were made, she put down the failure to the imperfect construction of the human organism, the constant aberrations of which necessitated the restraints imposed by religion and morality.

Mavis soon descended from the general to the particular.  Her mind continually dwelt on every incident of her brief acquaintance with Windebank:  she found that it was as much as she could do to justify the exigent scruples which had made her repel the man’s approaches.  One day, the scales fell from her eyes.  She had deserted the canal and was sitting in a field, some two miles from the town, where the few trees it contained were disposed as if they were continually setting to partners, in some arboreous quadrille.  The surrounding fields were tipped at all angles, as if in petulant discontent of one-time flatness.  With an effort she could discern, Jill’s tail wagging delightedly from a hole in a ditch, where she was hunting a rabbit.  The voice, the sights, the sounds of nature, all served to obliterate the effect of life, as she had, hitherto, regarded it, upon her processes of thought.  Archie Windebank’s wealth, social position and career were as nought to her; he appealed to her only as a man, and her conceivable relationship to him was but as female to male.