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.

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

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