This was in harmony with Letty's mood. Her soul was
clouded, and her heaven was only a place for the rain to fall
from. Annoyance, doubt, her new sense of constraint, and a wide-
reaching, undefined feeling of homelessness, all wrought together
to make her mind a chaos out of which misshapen things might
rise, instead of an ordered world in which gracious and
reasonable shapes appear. For as the place such will be the
thoughts that spring there; when all in us is peace divine, then,
and not till then, shall we think the absolutely reasonable.
Alas, that by our thoughtlessness or unkindness we should so
often be the cause of monster-births, and those even in the minds
of the loved! that we should be, if but for a moment, the demons
that deform a fair world that loves us! Such was Mrs. Wardour,
with her worldly wisdom, that day to Letty.
About half-way to Thornwick, the path crossed a little heathy
common; and just as Letty left the hedge-guarded field-side, and
through a gate stepped, as it were, afresh out of doors on the
open common, the wind came with a burst, and brought the rain in
earnest. It was not yet very heavy, but heavy enough, with the
wind at its back, and she with no defense but her parasol, to wet
her thoroughly before she could reach any shelter, the nearest
being a solitary, decrepit old hawthorn-tree, about half-way
across the common.
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