He had known that women had legs; his mother, the
laundress, suffered from hers--complainingly, devoted woman as she
was--swollen with much standing, and "them there dratted veins": stocky
legs, with loose folds of stocking.
As to thinking any more of a woman's legs than of the legs of a table,
the idea had never even occurred to him. But there you are! It is the
unexpected that happens: the sort of thing which we could never have
imagined ourselves as doing, thinking, feeling. The temptations we have
recognised, struggled against, are nothing; but there comes a sort of
wild, whistling wind from nowhere--much the same as that wind about
jenny's skirts, white apron--and our life is like a kaleidoscope,
suddenly shaken up and showing a completely fresh pattern.
Who could have thought it--who?--that Ben Cohen, dreamer, idealist,
passionate, pure, the devotee of art, would have fallen in love with
Jenny Bligh's legs--or, rather, a pair of ankles, and a little more at
that side where the wind caught her skirt--before he had so much as a
glimpse of her face?
Just over the bridge she stopped to speak with another girl who worked
in his own counting-house.
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