General Ainslie looked uncomfortable.
“Do you remember that Chinese funeral we saw at Pekin, George?” his wife continued. “Do you remember the widows in covered cages dragging along behind the corpse—and the big fellow with the prod walking behind each cage? And whenever the widows stopped howling, don’t you remember how those prods were worked until the response from inside was satisfactory?”
“Yes, but—really, I must say, Abbie——”
“Well, George—poverty is the prod. No wonder they mourn Wentworth.”
General Ainslie looked foolish. “I guess I won’t confess,” he said to himself, “that it was this afternoon I told the Bromfields they had only five hundred a year and the house in Stoughton. It would encourage her in her cynicism.”
CHAPTER II.
THE DESERT ISLAND.
THREE months later—August, September, and October, the months of Stoughton’s glory—gave Emily Bromfield a minute acquaintance with all that lay within her new horizon. She was as familiar with Stoughton as Crusoe with his island—and was in a Crusoe-like state of depression. She thought she had found the lowest despond of which human nature is capable on the day she saw the top of the Washington monument disappear, saw the last of the city of her enjoyments and her hopes. But now she dropped to a still lower depth—that depth in which the heart becomes a source of physical discomfort, the appetite fails, the brain sinks into a stupor and the health begins to decline.
“Don’t be so blue, Emmy,” Mrs. Ainslie had said at the station as they were leaving Washington. “Nothing is as bad as it seems in advance. Even Stoughton will have its consolations—though I must confess I can’t think what they could be at this distance.”
But the proverb was wrong and Stoughton as a reality was worse than Stoughton as a foreboding.
At first Emily was occupied in arranging their new home—creeper-clad, broad of veranda and viewing a long sloping lawn where the sun and the moon traced the shadows of century-old trees. She began to think that Stoughton was not so bad after all. The “best people” had called and had made a good impression. Her mother had for the moment lifted herself out of peevish and tearful grief, and had ceased giving double weight to her daughter’s oppressive thoughts by speaking them. But illusion and delusion departed with the departing sense of novelty.