A slow, silent process of alienation had been
going on in the girl ever since her engagement to Julius: it had first
touched her thoughts, then her feelings; now its blighting influence had
deteriorated her whole nature. And in her mother's heart there were sad
echoes of that bitter cry that comes down from age to age, "Oh, my son
Absalom, Absalom! My son, my son!"
"O Sophia! oh, my child, my child! How can you treat me so? What have I
done?" She was murmuring such words to herself when the door was opened,
and Sophia entered. It was characteristic of the woman that she did not
knock ere entering. She had always jealously guarded her rights to the
solitude of her own room; and, even when she was a school-girl, it had
been an understood household regulation that no one was to enter it
without knocking. But now that she was mistress of all the rooms in
Seat-Sandal, she ignored the simple courtesy towards others.
Consequently, when she entered, she saw the tears in her mother's eyes.
They only angered her. "Why should the sorrows of others darken her
happy home?" Sophia was one of those women whom long regrets fatigue. As
for her father, she reflected, "that he had been well nursed, decorously
buried, and that every propriety had been attended to. It was, in her
opinion, high time that the living--Julius and herself--should be
thought of." The stated events of life--its regular meals, its trivial
pleasures--had quite filled any void in her existence made by her
father's death.
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