“How gentle she looks!” she said softly. “And how much you must miss her!”
She stood for some time really trying to make acquaintance with the vanished woman through that faded pastel likeness of her in youth which Gerald kept where it had hung in her day, the portrait of herself which she womanishly preferred because, as she did not conceal, it flattered her.
“She looks like one of those people you would have just loved to lift the burdens off and make everything smooth 172for,” Aurora said; “and yet she looks like one of those people who spend their whole lives trying to make things smooth for others.”
“Yes,” said Gerald to that artless description of the feminine woman his mother had been, and stood beside his guest, looking pensively up at the portrait.
All at once, Aurora felt like crying. It had been increasing, the oppression to her spirits, ever since she entered this house to which she had come filled with gay anticipation and innocent curiosity. It had struck her from the first moment as gloomy, and it was undoubtedly cold, with its three sticks of wood ceremoniously smoking in the unaccustomed chimney-place. Its esthetic bareness had affected her like the meagerness of poverty. And now it seemed to her sad, horribly so, haunted by the gentle ghosts of that mother and sister who had known and touched all these things, sat in the chairs, looked through the windows, and who conceivably came back in the twilight to flit over the uncarpeted floor and peer in the dim mirrors to see how much the grave had changed them. She shivered. Yes, cold and bare and sad seemed Gerald’s dwelling. And Gerald, whose very bearing was a dignified denial that anything about himself or his circumstances could call for compassion–Gerald, thin and without color, looked to her cold-pinched and under-nourished. She had a sense of his long evenings alone, drearily without fire, his solitary meals in that dining-room so unsuggestive of good cheer; she thought of that single candle on the night-table burning in this cold, large room where he went to bed in that bed of iron, laying his head on that small hair pillow, to dream bitter dreams of a fair girl’s treachery.
She wanted to turn to him protesting:
173“Oh, I can’t stand it! What makes you do it?”
His next words changed the current of her thoughts.
“I have another portrait of my mother,” he said; “one I painted, which I will show you if you care to see it.”
She cheered up.