"Grief makes a person look like this," she thought. "I shall never be a girl again—Oliver was right: I am the kind to break early." Then, because to think of herself in the midst of such sorrow seemed to her almost wicked, she turned away from the mirror, and laid her crape-trimmed hat on the shelf in the wardrobe. She was wearing a dress of black Henrietta cloth, which had been borrowed from one of her neighbours who had worn mourning, and the blouse and sleeves hung with an exaggerated fullness over her thin arms and bosom. All that had distinguished her beauty—the radiance, the colour the flower-like delicacy of bloom and sweetness—these were blotted out by her grief and by the voluminous mourning dress of the nineties. A week had changed her, as even Harry's illness had not changed her, from a girl into a woman; and horrible beyond belief, with the exception of her mother, it had changed nothing else in the universe! The tragedy that had ruined her life had left the rest of the world—even the little world of Dinwiddie—moving as serenely, as indifferently, on its way towards eternity. On the morning of the funeral she had heard the same market wagons rumble over the cobblestones, the same droning songs of the hucksters, the same casual procession of feet on the pavement. A passionate indignation had seized her because life could be so brutal to death, because the terror and the pity that flamed in her soul shed no burning light on the town where her father had worked and loved and fought and suffered and died. A little later the ceaseless tread of visitors to the rectory door had driven this thought from her mind, but through every minute, while he lay in the closed room downstairs, while she sat beside her mother in the slow crawling carriage that went to the old churchyard, while she stood with bowed head listening to the words of the service—through it all there had been the feeling that something must happen to alter a world in which such a thing had been possible, that life must stop, that the heavens must fall, that God must put forth His hand and work a miracle in order to show His compassion and His horror.
But nothing had changed. After the funeral her mother had come home with her, and the others, many with tear-stained faces, had drifted in separate ways back to eat their separate dinners. For a few hours Dinwiddie had been shaken out of its phlegmatic pursuit of happiness; for a few hours it had attained an emotional solidarity which swept it up from the innumerable bypaths of the personal to a height where the personal rises at last into the universal. Then the ebb had come; the sense of tragedy had lessened slowly with the prolongation of feeling; and the universal vision had dissolved and crystallized into the pitiless physical needs of the individual. After the funeral a wave almost of relief had swept over the town at the thought that the suspension and the strain were at an end. The business of keeping alive, and the moral compulsion of keeping abreast of one's neighbours, reasserted their supremacy even while the carriages, quickening their pace a trifle on the return drive, rolled out of the churchyard. Now at the end of a week only Virginia and her mother would take the time from living to sit down and remember.
In the adjoining room, which was the nursery, Mrs. Pendleton was sitting beside the window, with her Bible open on her knees, and her head bent a little in the direction of Miss Priscilla, who was mending a black dress by the table.
"It is so sweet of you, dear Miss Priscilla," she murmured in her vague and gentle voice as Virginia entered. So old, so pallid, so fragile she looked, that she might have been mistaken by a stranger for a woman of eighty, yet the impossibility of breaking the habit of a lifetime kept the lines of her face still fixed in an expression of anxious cheerfulness. For more than forty years she had not thought of herself, and now that the opportunity had come for her to do so, she found that she had almost forgotten the way that one went about it. Even grief could not make her selfish any more than it could make her untidy. Her manner, like her dress, was so little a matter of impulse, and so largely a matter of discipline and of conscience, that it expressed her broken heart hardly more than did the widow's cap on her head or the mourning brooch that fastened the crape folds of her collar.
"Do you want anything, mother darling? What can I do for you?" asked Virginia, stooping to kiss her.
"Nothing, dear. I was just telling Miss Priscilla that I had had a visit from Mr. Treadwell, and that"—her voice quivered a little—"he showed more feeling than I should have believed possible. He even wanted to make me an allowance."
Miss Priscilla drew out her large linen handkerchief, which was like a man's, and loudly blew her nose. "I always said there was more in Cyrus than people thought," she observed. "Here, I've shortened this dress, Jinny, until it's just about your mother's length."
She tried to speak carelessly, for though she did not concur in the popular belief that to ignore sorrow is to assuage it, her social instinct, which was as strongly developed as Mrs. Pendleton's, encouraged her to throw a pleasant veil over affliction.
"You're looking pale for want of air, Jinny," she added, after a minute in which she had thought, "The child has broken so in the last few days that she looks years older than Oliver."
"I'm trying to make her go driving," said Mrs. Pendleton, leaning forward over the open page of her Bible.