Mrs. Upton was an appropriate center to so much ease and beauty. In deep
black though she was, her still girlish figure stretched out in a low
chair, her knees crossed, one foot held to the fire, she did not seem
to express woe or the poignancy of regret. The delicate appointments of
her dress, the freshness of her skin, her eyes, bright and unfatigued,
suggested nothing less than a widow plunged in remorseful grief. Her
eyes, indeed, were thoughtful, her lips, as she read her daughter's
communication, grave, but there was much discrepancy between her own aspect
and the letter's tone, and, letting it drop at last, she seemed herself
aware of it, sighing, glancing about her at the Chinese porcelain, the
tea-table, the dozing dog. She didn't look stricken, nor did she feel so.
The first fact only vaguely crossed her mind; the latter stayed and her
face became graver, sadder, in contemplating it. She contemplated it for a
long time, going over a retrospect in which her dead husband's figure and
her own were seen, steadily, sadly, but without severity for either.
Since the shock of the announcement, conveyed in a long, tender cable over
a week ago, she had had no time, as it were, to cast up these accounts with
the past. Her mind had known only a confused pain, a confused pity, for
herself and for the man whom she once had loved. The death, so long ago, of
that young love seemed more with her than her husband's death, which took
on the visionary, picture aspect of any tragedy seen from a distance, not
lived through.
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