Mrs. Bolton made no advances with Annie toward the discussion of her

friends; but when Annie asked about their families, she answered with the

incisive directness of a country-bred woman. She delivered her judgments as

she went about her work, the morning after the ladies' visit, while Annie

sat before the breakfast-table, which she had given her leave to clear. As

she passed in and out from the dining-room to the kitchen she kept talking;

she raised her voice in the further room, and lowered it when she drew near

again. She wore a dismal calico wrapper, which made no compromise with the

gauntness of her figure; her reddish-brown hair, which grew in a fringe

below her crown, was plaited into small tags or tails, pulled up and tied

across the top of her head, the bare surfaces of which were curiously

mottled with the dye which she sometimes put on her hair. Behind, this

was gathered up into a small knob pierced with a single hair-pin; the

arrangement left Mrs. Bolton's visage to the unrestricted expression of

character. She did not let it express toward Annie any expectation of the

confidential relations that are supposed to exist between people who have

been a long time master and servant. She had never recognised her relations

with the Kilburns in these terms. She was a mature Yankee single woman,

of confirmed self-respect, when she first came as house-keeper to Judge

Kilburn, twenty years ago, and she had not changed her nature in changing

her condition by her marriage with Oliver Bolton; she was childless, unless

his comparative youth conferred a sort of adoptive maternity upon her.

Annie went into her father's study, where she had lit the fire in the

Franklin-stove on her way to breakfast. It had come on to rain during the

night, after the fine yesterday which Mrs. Gerrish had denounced to its

face as a weather-breeder. At first it rained silently, stealthily; but

toward morning Annie heard the wind rising, and when she looked out of her

window after daylight she found a fierce north-easterly storm drenching

and chilling the landscape. Now across the flattened and tangled grass of

the lawn the elms were writhing in the gale, and swinging their long lean

boughs to and fro; from another window she saw the cuffed and hustled

maples ruffling their stiff masses of foliage, and shuddering in the

storm. She turned away, with a sigh of the luxurious melancholy which a

northeaster inspires in people safely sheltered from it, and sat down

before her fire. She recalled the three women who had visited her the day

before, in the better-remembered figures of their childhood and young

girlhood; and their present character did not seem a broken promise.

Nothing was really disappointed in it but the animal joy, the hopeful riot

of their young blood, which must fade and die with the happiest fate. She

perceived that what they had come to was not unjust to what they had been;

and as our own fate always appears to us unaccomplished, a thing for the

distant future to fulfil, she began to ask herself what was to be the

natural sequence of such a temperament, such mental and moral traits, as

hers. Had her life been so noble in anything but vague aspirations that she

could ever reasonably expect the destiny of grand usefulness which she had

always unreasonably expected? The question came home to her with such pain,

in the light of what her old playmates had become, that she suddenly ceased

to enjoy the misery of the storm out-of-doors, or the purring content of

the fire on the hearth of the stove at her feet; the book she had taken

down to read fell unopened into her lap, and she gave herself up to a

half-hour of such piercing self-question as only a high-minded woman can

endure when the flattering promises of youth have grown vague and few.




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