d foolish woman can impose on
long-suffering male humanity. As Madame Fosco (aged three-and-forty),
she sits for hours together without saying a word, frozen up in the
strangest manner in herself. The hideously ridiculous love-locks which
used to hang on either side of her face are now replaced by stiff
little rows of very short curls, of the sort one sees in old-fashioned
wigs. A plain, matronly cap covers her head, and makes her look, for
the first time in her life since I remember her, like a decent woman.
Nobody (putting her husband out of the question, of course) now sees in
her, what everybody once saw--I mean the structure of the female
skeleton, in the upper regions of the collar-bones and the
shoulder-blades. Clad in quiet black or grey gowns, made high round
the throat--dresses that she would have laughed at, or screamed at, as
the whim of the moment inclined her, in her maiden days--she sits
speechless in corners; her dry white hands (so dry that the pores of
her skin look chalky) incessantly engaged, either in monotonous
embroidery work or in rolling up endless cigarettes for the Count's own
particular smoking. On the few occasions when her cold blue eyes are
off her work, they are generally turned on her husband, with the look
of mute submissive inquiry which we are all familiar with in the eyes
of a faithful dog. The only approach to an inward thaw which I have
yet detected under her outer covering of icy constraint, has betrayed
itself, once or twice, in the form of a suppressed tigerish jealousy of
any woman in the house (the maids included) to whom the Count speaks,
or on whom he looks with anything approaching to special interest or
attention. Except in this one particular, she is always, morning,
noon, and night, indoors and out, fair weather or foul, as cold as a
statue, and as impenetrable as the stone out of which it is cut. For
the common purposes of society the extraordinary change thus produced
in her is, beyond all doubt, a change for the better, seeing that it
has transformed her into a civil, silent, unobtrusive woman, who is
never in the way. How far she is really reformed or deteriorated in
her secret self, is another question. I have once or twice seen sudden
changes of expression on her pinched lips, and heard sudden inflexions
of tone in her calm voice, which have led me to suspect that her
present state of suppression may have sealed up something dangerous in
her nature, which