Mrs. Bolton made no advances with Annie toward the discussion of her
friends; but when Annie asked about their families, she answered with the
incisive directness of a country-bred woman. She delivered her judgments as
she went about her work, the morning after the ladies' visit, while Annie
sat before the breakfast-table, which she had given her leave to clear. As
she passed in and out from the dining-room to the kitchen she kept talking;
she raised her voice in the further room, and lowered it when she drew near
again. She wore a dismal calico wrapper, which made no compromise with the
gauntness of her figure; her reddish-brown hair, which grew in a fringe
below her crown, was plaited into small tags or tails, pulled up and tied
across the top of her head, the bare surfaces of which were curiously
mottled with the dye which she sometimes put on her hair. Behind, this
was gathered up into a small knob pierced with a single hair-pin; the
arrangement left Mrs. Bolton's visage to the unrestricted expression of
character. She did not let it express toward Annie any expectation of the
confidential relations that are supposed to exist between people who have
been a long time master and servant. She had never recognised her relations
with the Kilburns in these terms. She was a mature Yankee single woman,
of confirmed self-respect, when she first came as house-keeper to Judge
Kilburn, twenty years ago, and she had not changed her nature in changing
her condition by her marriage with Oliver Bolton; she was childless, unless
his comparative youth conferred a sort of adoptive maternity upon her.
Annie went into her father's study, where she had lit the fire in the
Franklin-stove on her way to breakfast. It had come on to rain during the
night, after the fine yesterday which Mrs. Gerrish had denounced to its
face as a weather-breeder. At first it rained silently, stealthily; but
toward morning Annie heard the wind rising, and when she looked out of her
window after daylight she found a fierce north-easterly storm drenching
and chilling the landscape. Now across the flattened and tangled grass of
the lawn the elms were writhing in the gale, and swinging their long lean
boughs to and fro; from another window she saw the cuffed and hustled
maples ruffling their stiff masses of foliage, and shuddering in the
storm. She turned away, with a sigh of the luxurious melancholy which a
northeaster inspires in people safely sheltered from it, and sat down
before her fire. She recalled the three women who had visited her the day
before, in the better-remembered figures of their childhood and young
girlhood; and their present character did not seem a broken promise.
Nothing was really disappointed in it but the animal joy, the hopeful riot
of their young blood, which must fade and die with the happiest fate. She
perceived that what they had come to was not unjust to what they had been;
and as our own fate always appears to us unaccomplished, a thing for the
distant future to fulfil, she began to ask herself what was to be the
natural sequence of such a temperament, such mental and moral traits, as
hers. Had her life been so noble in anything but vague aspirations that she
could ever reasonably expect the destiny of grand usefulness which she had
always unreasonably expected? The question came home to her with such pain,
in the light of what her old playmates had become, that she suddenly ceased
to enjoy the misery of the storm out-of-doors, or the purring content of
the fire on the hearth of the stove at her feet; the book she had taken
down to read fell unopened into her lap, and she gave herself up to a
half-hour of such piercing self-question as only a high-minded woman can
endure when the flattering promises of youth have grown vague and few.