The sentiment sounded rather well; but it was really an
intense selfishness, wearing the mask of unselfishness. She did not
reflect that the daily love and duty due to others cannot be sinlessly
withheld, or given to some object of our own particular choice, or that
such a selfish idolatry is a domestic crime.
It was a very unhappy time to Charlotte. Her mother was weary with many
unusual cares, her father more silent and depressed than she had ever
before seen him. The sunny serenity of her happy home was disturbed by a
multitude of new elements, for an atmosphere of constant expectation
gave a restless tone to its usual placid routine. And through all and
below all, there was that feeling of money perplexity, which, where it
exists, is no more to be hid than the subtle odor of musk, present
though unseen.
This year the white winter appeared to Charlotte interminable in length.
The days in which it was impossible to go out, full of Sophia's sewing
and little worries and ostentations; the windy, tempestuous nights, that
swept the gathering drifts away; the cloudless moonlight nights, full of
that awful, breathless quiet that broods in land-locked dales,--all of
them, and all of Nature's moods, had become inexpressibly, monotonously
wearisome before the change came. But one morning at the end of March,
there was a great west wind charged with heavy rains, and in a few hours
the snow on all the fells had been turned into rushing floods, that came
roaring down from every side into the valley.
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