e went away to her
own room, and when Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the affair, he was
silent at first, as she had been. Then he said, "I don't know as I
should have wanted her to done differently; I don't know as she could.
If I ever come right again, she won't have anything to feel meeching
about; and if I don't, I don't want she should be beholden to anybody.
And I guess that's the way she feels."

The Coreys in their turn sat in judgment on the fact which their son
felt bound to bring to their knowledge.

"She has behaved very well," said Mrs. Corey, to whom her son had
spoken.

"My dear," said her husband, with his laugh, "she has behaved TOO well.
If she had studied the whole situation with the most artful eye to its
mastery, she could not possibly have behaved better."

The process of Lapham's financial disintegration was like the course of
some chronic disorder, which has fastened itself upon the constitution,
but advances with continual reliefs, with apparent amelioration, and at
times seems not to advance at all, when it gives hope of final recovery
not only to the sufferer, but to the eye of science itself. There were
moments when James Bellingham, seeing Lapham pass this crisis and that,
began to fancy that he might pull through altogether; and at these
moments, when his adviser could not oppose anything but experience and
probability to the evidence of the fact, Lapham was buoyant with
courage, and imparted his hopefulness to his household. Our theory of
disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and
novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives
and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches
us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to
the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Bursts
of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the
stricken survivors have their jests together, in which the thought of
the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many
others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the
sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and
making it all up again with the conventional fitness of things.
Lapham's adversity had this quality in common with bereavement. It was
not always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its moments
of being like prosperity, and if upon the whole it was continu