it would be a
comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about Charley? Won't you let
me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"
"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know I'm
unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.
"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the point
of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was stiffening the
bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle 'nineties.
"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she lifted the
baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions by the deep arm
of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at the blue sky and the
red wall from which the sparrow had flown. "You can never understand my
feelings because you are so different."
"Gabriella is not married," observed Mrs. Carr, with sentimental
finality. "But I'm sure, Jane--I'm just as sure as I can be of anything
that it wouldn't do a bit of harm to speak to Cousin Jimmy Wrenn. Men
know so much more than women about such matters."
In her effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of thread,
which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and while she
waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into the almost
deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted over
the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked every instant of her time,
except the few hours when she lay in bed trying to sleep, and the few
minutes when she sat at the table trying to eat, nothing that she began
was ever finished until Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her
best, for she was as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through
some tragic perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of
the simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and
thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small bony
nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes beneath
an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if they were
plastered on her forehead.
Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties, she had
married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason apparently than
that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and the marriage, which
had been one of reckless passion on his side, had been for her scarcely
more than the dreamer's hesitating compromise with reality. Passion,
which she had been taught to regard as an unholy attri
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