When Dr. Gilbert Anderson arrives at Baldry Court to examine Chris, Jenny has to search for her cousin on the grounds, where he is wandering with Margaret. Although Jenny usually takes great comfort in the estate's tranquil grounds, here she uses visual imagery to describe their suddenly ominous quality. In Jenny's eyes, the afternoon light makes the woods appear:
[...] rich and sinister and, to the eye, tropical. The jewel-bright buds on the soot-black boughs, and the blue valley distances, smudged here and there with the pink enamel of villa roofs [...] hurt my wet eyes as might beauty blazing under an equatorial sun. There was a tropical sense of danger too, for I walked as apprehensively as though a snake coiled under every leaf [...]
In this passage, lilting phrases like "jewel-bright buds" and "soot-black boughs" stimulate readers' visual imagination. It's also notable that Jenny references the "blue valley distances" (in other words, the landscape visible through the trees) and the "smudged" roofs she can see in the distance. By reducing the woods to a set of colorful but abstract visual elements and using words like "smudged" that are often associated with paints or other drawing implements, she renders the scene like an Impressionist painting. Impressionism, which prioritized color and emotion over strict realism, would have been a relatively new and startling art form in Jenny's era. Here, the implicit invocation of Impressionism emphasizes the unwelcome emotions plaguing Jenny, like jealousy and love for Chris, as well as the highly unconventional nature of his affair with a woman far below his own class. Jenny is worried that she will find Chris and Margaret in a romantic embrace that will force her to confront her own emotions and (in her mind) Chris's socially unacceptable behavior; the imagery of the passage communicates this fear without explicitly describing it.
It's important that Jenny communicates her sense of "danger" by describing the woods' "tropical" qualities. Comparing her discomfort to the experience of standing under "an equatorial sun" and referencing tropical animals like snakes, Jenny conjures the image of a non-European landscape and suggests that those landscapes are inherently "sinister." Centuries of British writers working before and during West's era exoticized climates that were foreign to them, especially those that fell under Britain's colonial rule. It was also common to link warm, unfamiliar environments with danger or moral corruption, as Charlotte Brontë does with her descriptions of Jamaica in Jane Eyre. It's impossible to say with certainty whether West herself held these prejudiced beliefs, or if she is merely expressing them as part of Jenny's sensibility. However, it's clear that Jenny shares the racial and colonial biases common among Europeans of her era.
