Agnes’s First Meeting with the Latin Tutor

Agnes’s First Meeting with the Latin Tutor begins with a stranger imagined at a distance and ends with the tutor left alone among apples, shelves, and the bird. He has come looking for the girl associated with the bird, but his fanciful fear of a witch’s daughter gives way to an encounter with Agnes that neither follows ordinary courtesies nor stays within them. A hand pressed firmly into his arm, a kiss, and her spoken name change the meeting from a search into an intimate and disorienting recognition.

The Search and First Approach

Before seeing Agnes, the tutor pictures her as half woman and half animal: thick-browed, crooked-legged, grey-haired, and smeared with mud and foliage. He imagines her limping and muttering as she rummages among charms and remedies. The fantasy reveals his apprehension, not Agnes’s appearance; he has never met her. At Hewlands he looks around the shadow of the pigsty and the bare branches of an apple tree, and checks the house windows and the stable before leaving through a gate to the road. He does not want to come upon the supposed witch’s daughter unexpectedly, yet remains intent on finding the girl.

A door opens to his left. A flurry of skirts and a creak of hinges announce the person he has been seeking: Agnes steps out of a rustic outbuilding and closes the door. The tutor coughs into his fist and offers a greeting. Agnes turns, raises her eyebrows slightly, and studies him from head to boots before answering. Her look seems, to him, almost as if she can see the thoughts inside his head. She addresses him formally and asks what has brought him to Hewlands. In the space of a few gestures, the scene reverses the distance between them: the imagined creature is replaced by a woman who examines the tutor, while his nervous search becomes direct conversation.

Touch and Disorientation

The encounter moves beyond conversation through touch. The tutor smiles and approaches Agnes; in the exchange immediately preceding their closer contact, he promises that he will not tell anyone and tries to reassure her, placing a hand on her arm. Agnes lays her hand over his. She grips the skin and muscle between his thumb and forefinger, pressing firmly and insistently. The force and location of the touch surprise him. It is almost painful; he holds his breath, feels dizzy, and cannot withdraw his hand without doing so abruptly. The tutor has the strange impression that nobody has touched him there in that way before, and the contact excites him.

The scene makes the body register what the characters have not yet named. Agnes’s grip leaves the tutor’s hand feeling exposed and damaged; after she releases him, the place she pressed remains hot and bare. He rubs his forehead with that same hand, as if trying to restore ordinary feeling. The bird, motionless on its perch and listening, remains present as the tutor’s attention shifts from the original search to the charged closeness between them. Their intimacy develops not through an explanation of what either wants, but through the pressure of her hand and his involuntary response.

The Kiss, the Name, and the Exit

When the tutor grows uneasy at Agnes’s silence and concentration, she leans toward him, lets go of his hand, and kisses him without warning. He registers the pulse of her lips, their pressure against his teeth, and the softness of her skin; then she draws back. The kiss makes the preceding touch more than an isolated surprise, but the scene does not pause to define the relationship or explain Agnes’s intention. Instead, she supplies the simplest personal fact only after the contact: she tells him that her name is Agnes.

The tutor recognizes the name without knowing anyone who bears it. He attends to its sound, considering how the spoken name differs from its written form and how its syllables must be voiced. That inward attention follows the kiss rather than preceding it: he has experienced Agnes physically before he can settle her name in his mind. She slips between him and the shelves, opens the door, and leaves. The light outside is white and dazzling; the door closes sharply behind her. The tutor remains alone with the falcon, the apples, and the smells of wood, autumn, feathers, and meat.

Significance of the Encounter

The meeting’s decisive change is from anxious expectation to an intimacy that unsettles the tutor. His imagined witch’s daughter belongs to a repertoire of fears and grotesque features; the actual Agnes is introduced through her attentive gaze, deliberate grip, and sudden kiss. Yet the scene does not simply replace his fantasy with a reassuringly familiar portrait. Her actions remain startling to him, and his physical reaction precedes comprehension.

The order of events gives the name unusual weight. Agnes does not begin with a conventional introduction: the tutor first sees her, is examined by her, feels her grip, and receives her kiss; only then does she say who she is. Her abrupt departure leaves that recognition unfinished. The meeting therefore establishes attraction as a force that has already altered the tutor’s composure, while preserving uncertainty about what Agnes intends and what their contact will become.