Margaret opened the window and drew in the shutters. Outside it was very still, and the snow was falling in fine flakes.
"The children will be so glad to-morrow," she remarked, "with all this snow. They are building a large bob-sled under Mr. Short's direction…. No!" she resumed her former thread of thought. "It doesn't count so much as we used to think—the variety of the thing you do, the change,—the novelty. It's the mind you do it with that makes it worth while."
Isabelle stared at the ceiling which was revealed fitfully by the dying fire. She still felt dead, numb, but this was a peaceful sort of grave, so remote, so silent. That endless torturing thought—the chain of weary reproach and useless speculation, which beset every waking moment—had ceased for the moment. It was like quiet after a perpetual whirring sound.
She liked to look at Margaret, to feel her near, but she mused over her. She was changed. Margaret had had this disease, too, this weariness of living, the torturing doubt,—if this or that, the one thing or the other, had happened, it might have been different,—the haggling of defeated will! No wonder she was glad to be out of the city up here at peace….
"But one can't stay out of life for always," she remonstrated.
"Why not? What you call the world seems to get along very well without us, without any one in particular. And I don't feel the siren call, not yet!"
"But life can't be over at thirty-three,—one can't be really dead, I suppose."
"No,—just beginning!" Margaret responded with an elasticity that amazed
Isabelle, who remembered the languid woman she had known so many years.
"Just beginning," she murmured, "after the journey in the dark."
'Of course,' mused Isabelle, 'she means the relief from Larry, the anxiety over the boy,—all that she has had to bear. Yes, for her there is some beginning anew. She might possibly marry Rob Falkner now, if his wife got somebody else to look after her silly existence. Why shouldn't she? Margaret is still young,—she might even be pretty again.' And Isabelle wished to know what the situation was between Margaret and Falkner.
Nothing, it seemed, could make any difference to herself! She ached to tell some one of the despair in her heart, but even to Margaret she could not speak. Since that summer morning six months before when Vickers had died without a spoken word, she had never said his name. Her husband had mutely respected her muteness. Then she had been ill,—too ill to think or plan, too ill for everything but remembrance. Now it was all shut up, her tragedy, festering at the bottom of her heart like an undrained wound, poisoning her soul…. Suddenly in the midst of her brooding she woke with a start at something Margaret was saying, so unlike her reticent self.