For another reason, which she could not yet analyse, Anne was glad that
nothing had been changed for her coming. It was as if she felt that it
would have been hard on Majendie if he had been put to much expense in
renovating his house for a woman in whom the spirit of the bride had
perished. The house in Prior Street was only a place for her body to
dwell in, for her soul to hide in, only walls around walls, the shell
of the shell.

She turned to her husband with a smile that flashed defiance to the
invading pathos of her state. Majendie's eyes brightened with hope,
beholding her admirable behaviour. He had always thoroughly approved of
Anne.

Upstairs, in the room that was her own, poor Edith (the cause, as he
felt, of their calamity) had indeed prepared for them with joy.

Majendie's sister lay on her couch by the window, as they had left her,
as they would always find her, not like a woman with a hopelessly injured
spine, but like a lady of the happy world, resting in luxury, a little
while, from the assault of her own brilliant and fatiguing vitality. The
flat, dark masses of her hair, laid on the dull red of her cushions, gave
to her face an abrupt and lustrous whiteness, whiteness that threw into
vivid relief the features of expression, the fine, full mouth, with its
temperate sweetness, and the tender eyes, dark as the brows that arched
them. Edith, in her motionless beauty, propped on her cushions, had
acquired a dominant yet passionless presence, as of some regal woman of
the earth surrendered to a heavenly empire. You could see that, however
sanctified by suffering, Edith had still a placid mundane pleasure in her
white wrapper of woollen gauze, and in her long lace scarf. She wore them
with an appearance of being dressed appropriately for a superb occasion.