The woman came.

"Has Miss Yolland left her room yet?" she asked.

"No, ma'am."

"Let her know I am in the drawing-room."

This said, she resumed her fire-gazing.

There was not much to see in the fire, for the fire is but a reflector,
and there was not much behind the eyes that looked into it for that
fire to reflect. Hesper was no dreamer--the more was the pity, for
dreams are often the stuff out of which actions are made. Had she been
a truer woman, she might have been a dreamer, but where was the space
for dreaming in a life like hers, without heaven, therefore without
horizon, with so much room for desiring, and so little room for hope?
The buz that greeted her entrance of a drawing-room, was the chief joy
she knew; to inhabit her well-dressed body in the presence of other
well-dressed bodies, her highest notion of existence. And even upon
these hung ever as an abating fog the consciousness of having a
husband. I can not say she was tired of marriage, for she had loathed
her marriage from the first, and had not found it at all better than
her expectation: she had been too ignorant to forebode half its horrors.

Education she had had but little that was worth the name, for she had
never been set growing; and now, although well endowed by nature, she
was gradually becoming stupid. People who have plenty of money, and
neither hope nor aspiration, must become stupid, except indeed they
hate, and then for a time the devil in them will make them a sort of
clever.

Miss Yolland came undulating. No kiss, no greeting whatever passed
between the ladies. Sepia began at once to rearrange a few hot-house
flowers on the mantel-piece, looking herself much like some dark flower
painted in an old missal.

"This day twelve months!" said Hesper.

"I know," returned Sepia.

"If one could die without pain, and there was nothing to come after!"
said Hesper. "What a tiresome dream it is!"

"Dream, or nightmare, or what you will, you had better get all you can
out of it before you break it," said Sepia.

"You seem to think it worth keeping!" yawned Hesper.

Sepia smiled, with her face to the glass, in which she saw the face of
her cousin with her eyes on the fire; but she made no answer. Hesper
went on.

"Ah!" she said, "your story is not mine. You are free; I am a slave.
You are alive; I am in my coffin."

"That's marriage," said Sepia, dryly.

"It would not matter much," continued Hesper, "if you could have your
co