Neither
father nor daughter alluded to the departure of Stephen. Mr.
Swancourt's manner towards her partook of the compunctious
kindness that arises from a misgiving as to the justice of some
previous act.
Either from lack of the capacity to grasp the whole coup d'oeil,
or from a natural endowment for certain kinds of stoicism, women
are cooler than men in critical situations of the passive form.
Probably, in Elfride's case at least, it was blindness to the
greater contingencies of the future she was preparing for herself,
which enabled her to ask her father in a quiet voice if he could
give her a holiday soon, to ride to St. Launce's and go on to
Plymouth.
Now, she had only once before gone alone to Plymouth, and that was
in consequence of some unavoidable difficulty. Being a country
girl, and a good, not to say a wild, horsewoman, it had been her
delight to canter, without the ghost of an attendant, over the
fourteen or sixteen miles of hard road intervening between their
home and the station at St. Launce's, put up the horse, and go on
the remainder of the distance by train, returning in the same
manner in the evening. It was then resolved that, though she had
successfully accomplished this journey once, it was not to be
repeated without some attendance.
But Elfride must not be confounded with ordinary young feminine
equestrians. The circumstances of her lonely and narrow life made
it imperative that in trotting about the neighbourhood she must
trot alone or else not at all.
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