There was a house
roofed with old grey stone slates in the background, and peaches trained
up by the window. The low garden wall of red brick--ancient red brick,
not the pale, dusty blocks of these days--was streaked with dry mosses
hiding the mortar. Clear and brilliant, the gaudy sun of morning shone
down upon her as she stood in the gateway, resting her arm on the red
wall, and pressing on the mosses which the heat had dried. Her face I do
not remember, only the arm. She had come out from dairy work, which needs
bare arms, and stood facing the bold sun. It was very large--some might
have called it immense--and yet natural and justly proportioned to the
woman, her work, and her physique. So immense an arm was like a
revelation of the vast physical proportions which our race is capable of
attaining under favourable conditions. Perfectly white--white as the milk
in which it was often plunged--smooth and pleasant in the texture of the
skin, it was entirely removed from coarseness. The might of its size was
chiefly by the shoulder; the wrist was not large, nor the hand. Colossal,
white, sunlit, bare--among the trees and the meads around it was a living
embodiment of the limbs we attribute to the first dwellers on earth.
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