, and, if she has grown no older, neither
have her clothes--not a particle. She dresses in gowns suitable for
Peggy, but which Maria, who is years younger than her aunt, would not
think of wearing. Elizabeth is the kind of woman who is a changed being
at the approach of a man; she is even different when Cyrus or Billy is
around; she brightens up and exerts herself to please them; but when
she is alone with Ada and me she is frankly bored and looks out of
the window in a sad, far-away manner. The presence of men has a most
rejuvenating effect on Aunt Elizabeth, although she pretends she has
never been interested in any man since her disappointment years ago.
When she got back and found Harry Goward here, instead of relapsing into
her lack-lustre ways, as she generally does, she kept on her interested
air.

I have always thought that houses have their atmosphere, like people,
and this house lately has seemed bewitched. After Mr. Goward left,
although every one tried to pretend things were as they should be, the
situation grew more and more uncomfortable. I felt it, though no one
told me a thing. I fancy that most older people have the same experience
often that I have had lately. All at once you are aware something is
wrong. You can't tell why you feel this; you only know that you are
living in the cold shadow of some invisible unhappiness. You see no
tears in the eyes of the people you love, but tears have been shed just
the same. Why? You don't know, and no one thinks of telling you. It
is like seeing life from so far off that you cannot make out what has
happened. I have sometimes leaned out of a window and have seen down the
street a crowd of gesticulating people, but I was too far off to know
whether some one was hurt or whether it was only people gathered around
a man selling something. When I see such things my heart beats, for I am
always afraid it is an accident, and so with the things I don't know in
my own household. I always fancy them worse than they are. There are
so many things one can imagine when one doesn't KNOW, and now I fancied
everything. Such things, I think, tell on older people more than on
younger ones, and at last I went to my room and kept there most of the
time, reading William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. It is
an excellent work in many ways. I am told it is given in sanitariums
for nervous people to read, for the purpose of getting their minds off
themselves. I found it useful