Next there was Mrs. Lane, the widow of an officer in the Union army, who had fallen in the battle of the Wilderness, and who eked out her small pension by decorating china for a large wholesale house, and supported a son at Yale College.
Then there was a Mrs. Farquier—the widow of a colonel in the Confederate army. She was an artist, and made drawings for the illustrated papers and magazines.
These two women, whose husbands had fallen on opposite sides of the same war, were great friends.
Next there were the two Misses Ward, orphan sisters, and teachers in the public schools.
Lastly, there was Lilith, who shared the landlady’s room, and was expected to share it until the young Methodist minister should marry and take possession of the parsonage that was being fitted up for him.
Lilith, who had been madly driven from her home by the goad of her husband’s stinging words:
“I never loved you! I married you only to please my dying father. In a very few hours I shall leave this house, never to return while you desecrate it with your presence!”
Lilith, who had fled away, without any definite purpose but to escape from the humiliations that had been heaped upon her, and to support her life, until she should die, by some honest toil—Lilith had now ample leisure to come to her senses and to reflect upon her past and her future.
Ample leisure indeed! Her days and nights were spent in solitude and meditation, for immediately after breakfast, every morning, her fellow-lodgers, workers all of them, scattered to their various occupations—the minister to study, to write, or to make duty calls; the two widows to their rooms to work at their arts; the two young teachers to their schoolrooms, and the good landlady to market, and then to her household duties.
Lilith, left alone, would wander through the parlor, up the stairs and into the room she shared with Mrs. Downie, and then back again, in an aimless, dreary manner. She could settle herself to nothing, take interest in nothing—