A hungry grief must be a double one."
"Did Mr. Winthrop say anything further to you about being out last
night?"
"A little," I replied, with scarlet cheeks; "but he will never do so
again. I shall not give him cause to reprove me."
"That is the most lady-like course. You are no longer a little girl, or a
school-girl either."
I wiped my plates in silence, but my mortification was none the less
intense. I realized then, more keenly than ever, that I must preserve the
proprieties, and confine myself to the restrictions of polite society.
The breezy, unconventional freedom Mrs. Flaxman had for those few months
permitted me had been so keenly enjoyed. I fretted uneasily at the forms,
and ceremonies of artificial life, while the aboriginal instincts, which
every free heart hides away somewhere in its depths, had been permitted
too full development.
The china cleansed, and put away, I stood surveying the shining pieces
that comprised our breakfast equipage, and like the tired clock in the
fable, thought wearily of the many hundred times Mrs. Flaxman had washed
those dishes; of the many thousand times they, or others, would go
through the same operation, until Mrs. Winthrop's sands of time had all
run out, and Oaklands gone to decay, or passed into other hands.
"Isn't it tiresome work washing dishes--the same yesterday, to-day and
fifty years hence? I wish I had been created a man; they don't have such
sameness in their work."
"Are you sure, dear? Fancy a bookkeeper's lot, or a clerk's reckoning up
columns of figures so like there is not a particle of variety; not a new
or thrilling idea in all their round of work from January to December,
unless we except a column that won't come right.
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