She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and
seated herself in a great chair where she had often watched before. She
was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling ill in
body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new
condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible
conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down
with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. For
now the thoughts came thickly. It was not in Dorothea's nature, for
longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the narrow cell of her
calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness that only sees
another's lot as an accident of its own.
She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again,
forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning.
Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only? She forced
herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life--a woman
towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some clearness
and comfort into her beclouded youth. In her first outleap of jealous
indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she had
flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit.
She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it
seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever.
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