It was a very pleasant change to a poor unsuccessful schoolmistress
to leave her own house, full of battered and shabby furniture (she
had taken the good-will and furniture of her predecessor at a
valuation, two or three years before), where the look-out was as
gloomy, and the surrounding as squalid, as is often the case in the
smaller streets of a country town, and to come bowling through the
Towers Park in the luxurious carriage sent to meet her; to alight,
and feel secure that the well-trained servants would see after her
bags, and umbrella, and parasol, and cloak, without her loading
herself with all these portable articles, as she had had to do
while following the wheelbarrow containing her luggage in going to
the Ashcombe coach-office that morning; to pass up the deep-piled
carpets of the broad shallow stairs into my lady's own room, cool and
deliciously fresh, even on this sultry day, and fragrant with great
bowls of freshly gathered roses of every shade of colour. There were
two or three new novels lying uncut on the table; the daily papers,
the magazines. Every chair was an easy-chair of some kind or other;
and all covered with French chintz that mimicked the real flowers in
the garden below. She was familiar with the bedroom called hers, to
which she was soon ushered by Lady Cumnor's maid. It seemed to her
far more like home than the dingy place she had left that morning;
it was so natural to her to like dainty draperies, and harmonious
colouring, and fine linen, and soft raiment. She sate down in the
arm-chair by the bed-side, and wondered over her fate something in
this fashion--
"One would think it was an easy enough thing to deck a looking-glass
like that with muslin and pink ribbons; and yet how hard it is to
keep it up! People don't know how hard it is till they've tried as
I have. I made my own glass just as pretty when I first went to
Ashcombe; but the muslin got dirty, and the pink ribbons faded, and
it is so difficult to earn money to renew them; and when one has got
the money one hasn't the heart to spend it all at once. One thinks
and one thinks how one can get the most good out of it; and a new
gown, or a day's pleasure, or some hot-house fruit, or some piece of
elegance that can be seen and noticed in one's drawing-room, carries
the day, and good-by to prettily decked looking-glasses. Now here,
money is like the air they breathe. No one even asks or knows how
much the washing costs, or what pink ribbon is a yard. Ah! it would
be different if they had to earn every penny as I have! They would
have to calculate, like me, how to get the most pleasure out of it.
I wonder if I am to go on all my life toiling and moiling for money?
It's not natural. Marriage is the natural thing; then the husband
has all that kind of dirty work to do, and his wife sits in the
drawing-room like a lady. I did, when poor Kirkpatrick was alive.
Heigho! it's a sad thing to be a widow."