Page:Magdalen by J S Machar.pdf/107

 unvaried, provincial manner. Everybody knows everybody else, and everybody has his precise daily work to do. They go out in the morning, meet friends, their feelers touch, as if they were telling their last night’s dreams, their trifling gossip, and the news of the day, and they move on, and again meet some one else, and again stand a while and talk, and then hurry on.

They know every motion of each other’s bodies, every minutest shade of their souls, everything connected with their past,—and yet a sweet habit urges them in passing to talk again and again of the same thing, as yesterday, so to-day, and so to-morrow. They somehow finish their work, as though it were of secondary importance. In the evening they return to their ant hill, and again they gather by twos, threes or fours upon their sidewalks and at the doorsteps, where they stand conversing pleasantly until deep into the night.

What an uproar, if something from with-