For some hours she was a little dazed
For some hours she was a little dazed, but her mind was of too light weight to be long cast down.?Jane rehearsed Holcroft’s words, described his manner, and sought with much insistence to show her mother that she must drop her nonsense at once. “I can see it in his eye,” said the girl, “that he won’t stand much more.?If yer don’t come down and keep yer hands busy and yer tongue still, we’ll tramp.?As to his marrying you, bah!?He’d jes’ as soon marry Mrs. Wiggins.”
This was awful prose, but Mrs. Mumpson was too bewildered and discouraged for a time to dispute it, and the household fell into a somewhat regular routine.?The widow appeared at her meals with the air of a meek and suffering martyr; Holcroft was exceedingly brief in his replies to her questions, and paid no heed to her remarks.?After supper and his evening work, he went directly to his room.?Every day, however, he secretly chafed with ever-increasing discontent, over this tormenting presence in his house.?The mending and such work as she attempted was so wretchedly performed that it would better have been left undone.?She was also recovering her garrulousness, and mistook his toleration and her immunity in the parlor for proof of a growing consideration. “He knows that my hands were never made for such coarse, menial tasks as that Viggins does,” she thought, as she darned one of his stockings in a way that would render it almost impossible for him to put his foot into it again. “The events of last Monday morning were unfortunate, unforeseen, unprecedented.?I was unprepared for such vulgar, barbarous, unheard-of proceedings–taken off my feet, as it were; but now that he’s had time to think it all over, he sees that I am not a common woman like Viggins,”–Mrs. Mumpson would have suffered rather than have accorded her enemy the prefix of Mrs.,–“who is only fit to be among pots and kettles.?He leaves me in the parlor as if a refined apartment became me and I became it.?Time and my influence will mellow, soften, elevate, develop, and at last awaken a desire for my society, then yearnings.?My first error was in not giving myself time to make a proper impression.?He will soon begin to yield like the earth without.?First it is hard and frosty, then it is cold and muddy, if I may permit myself so disagreeable an illustration.?Now he is becoming mellow, and soon every word I utter will be like good seed in good ground.?How aptly it all fits!?I have only to be patient.”
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