Sorrowful, too, is the household. A lack of geniality pervades it from garret to basement; no one seems quite to know what is the matter, but "suspect" that "crow that flies in Heaven's sweetest air" stalks rampant up stairs and down, and damps the ardor of everyone.
Dulce had waked early, had risen from her bed, and—with the curious feeling full upon her of one who breaks her slumber knowingly that some grief had happened to her over night, the remembrance of which eludes her in a tantalizing fashion—had thrown wide her window, and gazed with troubled eyes upon the dawning world.
Then knowledge came to her, and the thought that she had made a new contract that must influence all her life, and with this knowledge a sinking of the heart, but no drawing back and no repentance. She dressed herself; she knelt down and said her prayers, but peace did not come to her, or rest or comfort of any sort, only an unholy feeling of revenge, and an angry satisfaction that should not have found a home in her gentle breast.
She dressed herself with great care. Her prettiest morning gown she donned, and going into the garden plucked a last Maréchal Niel rose and placed it against her soft cheek, that was tinted as delicate as itself.
And then came breakfast. And with a defiant air, but with some inward shrinking she took her place behind the urn, and prepared to pour out tea for the man who yesterday was her affianced husband, but who for the future must be less than nothing to her.
But as fate ordains it she is not called upon to administer bohea to Roger this morning. Mr. Dare does not put in appearance, and breakfast is got through—without, indeed, an outbreak of any sort, but in a dismal fashion that bespeaks breakers ahead, and suggests hidden but terrible possibilities in the future.
Dulce is decidedly cross; a sense of depression is weighing her down, a miserable state of melancholy that renders her unjust in her estimate of all those around her. She tells herself she hates Roger; and then again that she hates Stephen, too; and then the poor child's eyes fill with tears born of a heartache and difficult of repression; to analyze them she knows instinctively would be madness, so she blinks them bravely back again to their native land, and having so got rid of them, gives herself up to impotent and foolish rage, and rails inwardly against the world and things generally.
Even to Portia she is impatient, and Julia she has annihilated twice. The latter has been lamenting all the morning over a milliner's bill that in length and heaviness has far exceeded her anticipations.
But this is nothing; Julia is always so lamenting, and indeed, I never yet saw the milliner's bill, however honest, that wasn't considered a downright swindle, and three times as exorbitant as it ought to be!
"Now look at this, my dear Dulce," says the unobservant Julia, holding out a strip of paper about half a yard in length to Miss Blount, who has been ominously silent for the past hour. "I assure you the trimmings on that dress never came to that. They were meagre to the last degree; just a little suspicion of lace, and a touch of velvet here and there. It is absurd—it is a fraud. Did your trimmings ever come to that?"