The steps that led to this determination were no longer clear to her questioning mind. She was also able, hour by brooding hour, to pile up against it ever new objections. But she clung to it blindly, with a forlorn tenacity of spirit that swept aside all momentary issues and all dread of the future. For out of that seeming defeat, she contended, she would wring her belated and her inner victory, even while her active imagination, playing lambently ahead of dragging reality, showed her how painful would be that return to old conditions and outgrown surroundings.
For a woman who has known the world to go back to such a roof is always a sign and a confession of defeat. Yet the sweep of her aggressive young mind, once made up, flung blindly aside each half-accumulated bar of indecision.
But was it fair to them?—she suddenly demanded of herself, as she pictured the scenes and the faces that would confront her, the gentle and mild-mannered women, the venerable and upright-hearted curate, so jealous of equity and honor, with his unbending singleness and narrowness of outlook. And as she asked this question each familiar figure seemed to stalk grimly from its muffling childhood memories and confront her, a challenging sentinel at the very threshold of that quiet little home which she had dreamed as always open to her, as always a harbor of ultimate refuge.
But now, could she face the unspoken deceit, the daily attrition of it, month after month and year after year? For clearly she foresaw what her life would be, from sunrise to sunset, from youth to old age, from the moment the quiet parsonage gate closed between her and the outer world. She foresaw it plainly, as distinctly and indelibly as though it had been set down in black and white before her eyes—the long and narrow and grimly defined path leading from a narrow and weather-beaten gate to a still narrower open grave. In summer time, in the quiet grounds behind the shielding gray walls, there would be the Provence roses to tend and the border-flowers to cut and trim, the sedate visiting and receiving, the frugal jam-making, the regular Bible-readings and the family prayers, the careful mending and remaking, the hemming of the clerical old-fashioned white cravats, the lonely cawing of the rooks through the quiet mornings and the long afternoons. And in the winter there would be the woollen jackets and cough mixtures to distribute throughout the parish, the stockings to be knit for the workhouse children, the long, silent games of chess in the mullion-windowed study, the lettering and numbering of the new books for the parish lending library, the pathetically threadbare suit of respectable broadcloth to press and repair, the summer linens and serges to be made over, the discussions of impending Disestablishment and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, the languid flow of life within doors and the gentle diversions of life without, punctuated by long Sundays, in gloomy high-partitioned pews with faded crimson cushions.