for _me_ to say," went on Martha, in an injured tone, "I'd
not be for feedin' up every man, woman and child that shows their
face inside the grounds. Why, they don't appreciate it no more
than--"

The woman's eloquent gesture appeared to include the blue-bottle fly
buzzing noisily on the window-pane:

"Goodness gracious! if these flies ain't enough to drive a body
crazy--what with the new paint and all...."

Chapter XIII

Lydia laid the picture carefully away in a pigeonhole of her desk.
She was still thinking soberly of the subtle web of prejudices,
feelings and conditions into which she had obtruded her one fixed
purpose in life. But if Mr. Elliot had been as good as engaged to
Fanny Dodge, as Mrs. Solomon Black had been at some pains to imply,
in what way had she (Lydia) interfered with the denouement?

She shook her head at last over the intricacies of the imperfectly
stated problem. The idea of coquetting with a man had never entered
Lydia's fancy. Long since, in the chill spring of her girlhood, she
had understood her position in life as compared with that of other
girls. She must never marry. She must never fall in love, even. The
inflexible Puritan code of her uncle's wife had found ready
acceptance in Lydia's nature. If not an active participant in her
father's crime, she still felt herself in a measure responsible for
it. He had determined to grow rich and powerful for her sake. More
than once, in the empty rambling talk which he poured forth in a
turgid stream during their infrequent meetings, he had told her so,
with extravagant phrase and gesture. And so, at last, she had come to
share his punishment in a hundred secret, unconfessed ways. She ate
scant food, slept on the hardest of beds, labored unceasingly, with
the great, impossible purpose of some day making things right: of
restoring the money they--she no longer said _he_--had stolen; of
building again the waste places desolated by the fire of his ambition
for her. There had followed that other purpose, growing ever stronger
with the years, and deepening with the deepening stream of her
womanhood: her love, her vast, unavailing pity for the broken and
aging man, who would some day be free. She came at length to the time
when she saw clearly that he would never leave the prison alive,
unless in some way she could contrive to keep open the clogging
springs of hope and desire. She began deliberately and with purpose
to call back memories of