oden chairs, the white calico
curtains with meek cotton fringes, the queer little prints on the walls,
the painted wooden bedsteads, seemed to her in their very poorness and
unpretentiousness to be emblematical of all the virtues. As she lingered
in the quiet rooms, while Letty raced along the passages, Anna said to
herself that this Spartan simplicity, this absence of every luxury that
could still further soften an already languid and effeminate soul, was
beautiful. Here, as in the whitewashed praying-places of the Puritans,
if there were any beauty and any glory it must all come from within, be
all of the spirit, be only the beauty of a clean life and the glory of
kind thoughts. She pictured herself waking up in one of those unadorned
beds with the morning sun shining on her face, and rising to go her
daily round of usefulness in her quiet house, where there would be no
quarrels, and no pitiful ambitions, and none of those many bitter
heartaches that need never be. Would they not be happy days, those days
of simple duties? "The better life--the better life," she repeated
musingly, standing in the middle of the big room through whose tall
windows she could see the garden, and a strip of marshy land, and then
the grey sea and the white of the gulls and the dark line of the Ruegen
coast over which the dusk was gathering; and she counted on her fingers
mechanically, "Simplicity, frugality, hard work. Uncle Joachim said
_that_ was the better life, and he was wise--oh, he was very wise--but
still----And he loved me, and understood me, but still----"

Looking up she caught sight of herself in a long glass opposite, a slim
figure in a fur cloak, with bare head and pensive eyes, lost in
reflection. It reminded her of the day the letter came, when she stood
before the glass in her London bedroom dressed for dinner, with that
same sentence of his persistently in her ears, and how she had not been
able to imagine herself leading the life it described. Now, in her
travelling dress, pale and tired and subdued after the long journey,
shorn of every grace of clothes and curls, she criticised her own
fatuity in having held herself to be of too fine a clay, too delicate,
too fragile, for a life that might be rough. "Oh, vain and foolish one!"
she said aloud, apostrophising the figure in the glass with the familiar
_Du_ of the days before her mother died, "Art thou then so much better
than others, that thou must for ever be only ornament