The only interesting thing in it was, that on all sides
were doors, which must lead out of it, and might lead to a better
place.
It was about eleven o'clock of a November morning--more like one
in March. There might be a thick fog before the evening, but now
the sun was shining like a brilliant lump of ice--so inimical to
heat, apparently, that a servant had just dropped the venetian
blind of one of the windows to shut his basilisk-gaze from the
sickening fire, which was now rapidly recovering. Betwixt the
cold sun and the hard earth, a dust-befogged wind, plainly
borrowed from March, was sweeping the street.
Mr. and Mrs. Redmain had returned to town thus early because
their country-place was in Cornwall, and there Mr. Redmain was
too far from his physician. He was now considerably better,
however, and had begun to go about again, for the weather did not
yet affect him much. He was now in his study, as it was called,
where he generally had his breakfast alone. Mrs. Redmain always
had hers in bed, as often with a new novel as she could, of which
her maid cut the leaves, and skimmed the cream. But now she was
descending the stair, straight as a Greek goddess, and about as
cold as the marble she is made of--mentally rigid, morally
imperturbable, and vacant of countenance to a degree hardly
equaled by the most ordinary of goddesses. She entered the
drawing-room with a slow, careless, yet stately step, which
belonged to her, I can not say by nature, for it was not natural,
but by ancestry.
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