g in some feminine attraction.
She had ever been brown and homely, but her features had been
well-formed, and her eyes had been bright. Now, as she approached to
thirty years of age, she might have been as well-looking as at any
earlier period of her life if it had been her wish to possess good
looks. But she had had no such wish. On the contrary, her desire had
been to be ugly, forbidding, unattractive, almost repulsive; so that,
in very truth, she might be known to be a widow indeed. And here
I must not be misunderstood. There was nothing hypocritical about
Mrs. Prime, nor did she make any attempt to appear before men to
be weighted with a deeper sorrow than that which she truly bore;
hypocrisy was by no means her fault. Her fault was this; that she had
taught herself to believe that cheerfulness was a sin, and that the
more she became morose, the nearer would she be to the fruition of
those hopes of future happiness on which her heart was set. In all
her words and thoughts she was genuine; but, then, in so very many of
them she was mistaken! This was the wall against which Mrs. Ray had
allowed herself to be fastened for many years past, and though the
support was strong it must be admitted that it could hardly have been
at all times pleasant.

Mrs. Ray had become a widow before she was thirty; and she had
grieved for her husband with truest sorrow, pouring herself out at
first in tears, and afterwards expending herself in long hours of
vain regrets. But she had never been rough or hard in her widowhood.
It had ever been her nature to be soft. She was a woman all over,
and had about her so much of a woman's prettiness, that she had not
altogether divested herself of it, even when her weepers had been of
the broadest. To obtain favour in men's eyes had never been in her
mind since she had first obtained favour in the eyes of him who had
been her lord; but yet she had never absolutely divested herself
of her woman charms, of that look half retreating, half beseeching,
which had won the heart of the ecclesiastical lawyer. Gradually her
weeds and her deep heavy crapes had fallen away from her, and then,
without much thought on the matter, she dressed herself much as
did other women of forty or forty-five,--being driven, however, on
certain occasions by her daughter to a degree of dinginess, not by
any means rivalling that of the daughter herself, but which she would
not have achieved had she been left to her own devices.