She was a full-bodied lady, in clothes rather too tight for
her, and she panted a little after the ascent of the stairs. It seemed
to her once more a strangely and inexplicably perverse act of
Providence, to whom she had always paid deference, by which so
incalculable a rise in the social scale had been denied to her.
Then she advanced a step, her eyes straying from the shrouded bed to
the wardrobe and back again. Then she set the candlestick upon the
table and turned round.
It must now be premised that Mrs. Nugent was utterly without a trace
of what is known as superstition; for the whole evidential value of
what follows, such as it is, depends upon that fact. She would not, by
preference, sleep in a room immediately after a death had taken place
in it, but solely for the reason of certain ill-defined physical
theories which she would have summed up under the expression that "it
was but right that the air should be changed." Her views on human
nature and its component parts were undoubtedly practical and
common-sense. To put it brutally, Amy's body was in the churchyard and
Amy's soul, crowned and robed, in heaven; so there was no more to
account for. She knew nothing of modern theories, nothing of the
revival of ancient beliefs; she would have regarded with kindly
compassion, and met with practical comments, that unwilling shrinking
from scenes of death occasionally manifested by certain kind of
temperaments.
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