A large white arm, bare, in the sunshine, to the shoulder, carelessly
leant against a low red wall, lingers in my memory. 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.