Soft white
clouds had come slowly sailing up out of the west; the plain was
flecked with thin floating shadows, gently borne along by the
westerly wind that was waving the long grass in the hay-fields
into alternate light and shade. Jemima went into one of these
fields, lying by the side of the upland road. She was stunned by
the shock she had received. The diver leaving the green sward,
smooth and known, where his friends stand with their familiar
smiling faces, admiring his glad bravery--the diver, down in an
instant in the horrid depths of the sea, close to some strange,
ghastly, lidless-eyed monster, can hardly more feel his blood
curdle at the near terror than did Jemima now. Two hours ago--but
a point of time on her mind's dial--she had never Imagined that
she should ever come in contact with any one who had committed
open sin; she had never shaped her conviction into words and
sentences, but still it was there, that all the respectable, all
the family and religious circumstances of her life, would hedge
her in, and guard her from ever encountering the great shock of
coming face to face with Vice. Without being pharisaical in her
estimation of herself, she had all a Pharisee's dread of
publicans and sinners, and all a child's cowardliness--that
cowardliness which prompts it to shut its eyes against the object
of terror, rather than acknowledge its existence with brave
faith.
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