Fourth Happiest One from this deep infamy.

+ + + + +

The great Day is over. Pippa, back in her room, finds horribly uppermost
among her memories the talk of those lamentable four girls. It had
spoilt the sweetness of her day; it spoils now, for a while, her own
sweetness. Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her
morning fancies, for Pippa is very human--she can envy and decry,
swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many
another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours.
Just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid
by malice and ugliness, _she_ finds it; she can only think "how pert
that girl was," and how glad she is not to be like her. Yet, all the
same, she does not see why she should not have been told who it was that
"passed that jest upon her" of the Englishman in love--no foreigner had
come to the mills that she recollects. . . . And perhaps, after all, if
Luca raises the wage, she may be able to buy shoes next year, and not
look any worse than Zanze.

But gradually the atmosphere of her mind seems restored; the fogs of
envy and curiosity begin to clear off--she goes over the game of
make-believe, how she was in turn each of the Four . . . but no! the
miasma is still in the air, and she's "tired of fooling," and New Year's
Day is over, and ill or well, _she_ must be content. . . . Even her
lily's asleep, but she will wake it up, and show it the friend she has
plucked for it--the flower she gathered as she passed the house on the
hill. . . . Alas! even the flower seems infected. She compares it, "this
pampered thing," this double hearts-ease of the garden, with the wild
growth, and once more Zanze comes to mind--isn't she like the pampered
blossom? And if there were a king of the flowers, "and a girl-show held
in his bowers," which would he like best, the Zanze or the Pippa? . . .
No: nothing will conquer her dejection; fancies will not do, awakening
sleepy lilies will not do--

"Oh what a drear dark close to my poor day!
How could that red sun drop in that black cloud?"

and despairingly she accepts the one truth that seems to confront her:
"Day's turn is over, now arrives the night's;" the larks and thrushes
and blackbirds have had their hour; owls and bats and such-like things
rule now . . . and listlessly she begins to undress herself. She is so
alone; she has nothing but fancie