Franklin-stove on her way to breakfast. It had come on to rain during the
night, after the fine yesterday which Mrs. Gerrish had denounced to its
face as a weather-breeder. At first it rained silently, stealthily; but
toward morning Annie heard the wind rising, and when she looked out of her
window after daylight she found a fierce north-easterly storm drenching
and chilling the landscape. Now across the flattened and tangled grass of
the lawn the elms were writhing in the gale, and swinging their long lean
boughs to and fro; from another window she saw the cuffed and hustled
maples ruffling their stiff masses of foliage, and shuddering in the
storm. She turned away, with a sigh of the luxurious melancholy which a
northeaster inspires in people safely sheltered from it, and sat down
before her fire. She recalled the three women who had visited her the day
before, in the better-remembered figures of their childhood and young
girlhood; and their present character did not seem a broken promise.
Nothing was really disappointed in it but the animal joy, the hopeful riot
of their young blood, which must fade and die with the happiest fate. She
perceived that what they had come to was not unjust to what they had been;
and as our own fate always appears to us unaccomplished, a thing for the
distant future to fulfil, she began to ask herself what was to be the
natural sequence of such a temperament, such mental and moral traits, as
hers. Had her life been so noble in anything but vague aspirations that she
could ever reasonably expect the destiny of grand usefulness which she had
always unreasonably expected? The question came home to her with such pain,
in the light of what her old playmates had become, that she suddenly ceased
to enjoy the misery of the storm out-of-doors, or the purring content of
the fire on the hearth of the stove at her feet; the book she had taken
down to read fell unopened into her lap, and she gave herself up to a
half-hour of such piercing self-question as only a high-minded woman can
endure when the flattering promises of youth have grown vague and few.