She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took
from a bottom drawer--where long ago it had been stored away under
everything else--a shawl that had been her grandmother's; a brindled
crewel shawl,--sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former
generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she
had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her
ugliness and decrepitude.
She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around
her shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting
it off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She
turned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge
lidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew
a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put her
forefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding places
under the mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let these
hang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefully
nourished look of youth from her face--dropped the will to look
young--and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it--into the
wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, assisting each other so
ably, had wrought in her.
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