If you had not written to me... we had broke now, the Frenchmen bogged us so often with departing.

He introduced the woman to his wife, feeling an unfamiliar uxorial pride as he did it, showing off Emily's angular beauty at forty-four to this worn and hollowed former girl, misshapen from labor and rural poverty, who might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five, and who had reached a plateau of endurance of which her body was a map.

The stony outcrops are often covered but thinly with arable soil; winters are bitingly cold, and rainfall scanty and unpredictable.

to acquire decent habits and manners