ns and daughters may entertain such sentiments; even the girls,
whose life, no doubt, had been a dull one, might be supposed willing
enough, with a faint pretence of natural and traditionary reluctance,
and those few natural tears which are wiped so soon, to leave home and
see the world. But the mother! In ordinary circumstances it would
have been the duty of the historian to set forth the hardness of Mrs.
Warrender's case, deprived at once, by her husband's death, not only of
her companion and protector, but of her home and position as head of an
important house. Such a case is no doubt often a hard one. It adds a
hundred little humiliations to grief, and makes bereavement downfall,
the overthrow of a woman's importance in the world, and her exile from
the sphere in which she has spent her life. We should be far more sure
of the reader's sympathy if we pictured her visiting for the last time
all the familiar haunts of past years, tearing herself away from the
beloved rooms, feeling the world a blank before her as she turned away.

On the contrary, it is scarcely possible to describe the chill of
disappointment in her mind when Theo put an abrupt stop to all
speculations, and offered her his arm to lead her upstairs. She ought,
perhaps, to have wanted his support to go upstairs, after all, as
her maid said, that she had "gone through": but she did not feel the
necessity. She would have preferred much to know what was going to be
done, to talk over everything, to be able to express without further
sense that they were premature and inappropriate, as much as it would be
expedient to express of her own wishes. The absolute repression of those
five dark days, during which she had said nothing, had been almost more
intolerable to her than years of the repression which was past. When you
know that nothing you can do or say is of any use, and that whatsoever
struggle you may make will be wholly ineffectual to change your lot,
it is comparatively easy, in the composure of impossibility, to keep
yourself down; but when all at once you become again master of your own
fate, even a temporary curb becomes intolerable. Mrs. Warrender went
into her room by the compulsion of her son and conventional propriety,
and was supposed to lie down on the sofa and rest for an hour or two.
Her maid arranged the cushions for her, threw a shawl over her feet,
and left her on tip-toe, shutting the door with elaborate precautions.
Mrs. Warrender remai