d it superbly. From the dignity of possessions she had
passed to the finer dignity of a poverty that can do without. All the
intellect in her (for she was not clever) had been transmuted into
character by this fiery passage from romance into reality, and though
life had done its worst with her, some fine invincible blade in the
depths of her being she had never surrendered. She would have gone to
the stake for a principle as cheerfully as she had descended from her
aristocratic niche into unceasing poverty and self-denial, but she would
have gone wearing garlands on her head and with her faint, grave smile,
in which there was almost every quality except that of humour, touching
her lips. Her hands, which were once lovely, were now knotted and worn;
for she had toiled when it was necessary, though she had toiled always
with the manner of a lady. Even to-day it was a part of her triumph that
this dignity was so vital a factor in her life that there was none of
her husband's laughter at circumstances to lighten her burden. To her
the daily struggle of keeping an open house on starvation fare was not a
pathetic comedy, as with Gabriel, but a desperately smiling tragedy.
What to Gabriel had been merely the discomfort of being poor when
everybody you respected was poor with you, had been to his wife the slow
agony of crucifixion. It was she, not he, who had lain awake to wonder
where to-morrow's dinner could be got without begging; it was she, also,
who had feared to doze at dawn lest she should oversleep herself and not
be downstairs in time to scrub the floors and the furniture before the
neighbours were stirring. Uncle Isam, whose knees were crippled with
rheumatism, and Docia, who had a "stitch" in her side whenever she
stooped, were the only servants that remained with her, and the nursing
of these was usually added to the pitiless drudgery of her winter. But
the bitter edge to all her suffering was the feeling which her husband
spoke of in the pulpit as "false pride"--the feeling she prayed over
fervently yet without avail in church every Sunday--and this was the
ignoble terror of being seen on her knees in her old black calico dress
before she had gone upstairs again, washed her hands with cornmeal,
powdered her face with her pink flannel starchbag, and descended in her
breakfast gown of black cashmere or lawn, with a net scarf tied daintily
around her thin throat, and a pair of exquisitely darned lace ruffles
hiding her