In the drawing-room he insisted on being nursed; and alone, amid the faded
furniture, watched over by the old portraits, her pale face fixed and her
pale hands clasping her beloved dog, she sat thinking, brooding over the
unhappiness, the incurable unhappiness, of her little life. She was
absorbed in self, and did not rail against Hubert, or even Julia. Their
personalities had somehow dropped out of her mind, and merely represented
forces against which she found herself unable any longer to contend. Nor
was she surprised at what had happened. There had always been in her some
prescience of her fate. She and unhappiness had always seemed so
inseparable, that she had never found it difficult to believe that this
last misfortune would befall her. She had thought it over, and had decided
that it would be unendurable to live any longer, and had borne many a
terrible insomnia so that she might collect sufficient chloral to take her
out of her misery; and now, as she sat thinking, she remembered that she
had never, never been happy. Oh! the miserable evenings she used to spend,
when a child, between her father and mother, who could not agree--why, she
never understood. But she used to have to listen to her mother addressing
insulting speeches to her father in a calm, even voice that nothing could
alter; and, though both were dead and years divided her from that time, the
memory survived, and she could see it all again--that room, the very paper
on the wall, and her father being gradually worked up into a frenzy.
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