"Yes," said Anthony, "it is late." His voice sounded hushed and constrained, and, as he stood aside to allow her to pass, he looked beyond and not at the girl.
She turned from him and entered her room.
CHAPTER X
Mariana found Miss Ramsey lying at length upon the hearth-rug in her tiny sitting-room, her head resting upon an eider-down cushion.
At the girl's entrance she looked up nervously. "I can't rest," she said, with a plaintive intonation, "and I am so tired. But when I shut my eyes I see spread before me all the work I've got to do to-morrow."
She sat up, passing her hand restlessly across her forehead. In her appearance there might be detected an almost fierce renunciation of youth. Her gown was exaggerated in severity, and her colorless and uncurled hair was strained from her forehead and worn in a tight knot upon the crown of her head. The prettiness of her face was almost aggressive amid contrasting disfigurements.
Miss Ramsey belonged to that numerous army of women who fulfil life as they fulfil an appointment at the dentist's—with a desperate sense of duty and shaken nerves. And beside such commonplace tragedies all dramatic climaxes show purposeless. The saints of old, who were sanctified by fire and sword, might well shrink from the martyrdom sustained, smiling, by many who have endured the rack of daily despair. To be a martyr for an hour is so much less heroic than to be a man for a lifetime.
But in Miss Ramsey's worn little body, incased in its network of nerves, there was the passionless determination of her Puritan ancestors. Life had been thrust upon her, and she accepted it. In much the same spirit she would have accepted hell. Perhaps, in meeting the latter, a little cheerfulness might have been added to positive pain—since of all tragedies her present tragedy of unfulfilment was the most tragic of all.
Mariana knelt beside her and kissed her with quick sympathy.
"I can't rest," repeated the elder woman, fretfully. "I can't rest for thinking of the work I must do to-morrow."