She looked like a sleep-walker. When she
reached it she knelt down and opened it and gathered the books in her
arms. When her husband returned two hours later she lay on the floor
in a dead faint, the books scattered about her.
XXVII
It was morning before he could revive her, and two days before she
could leave her bed. Then she developed the hacking cough he dreaded.
He took her to the Sandwich Islands and kept her there for a month.
The even climate and the sea voyage seemed to relieve her, but when
they returned to San Francisco she began to cough again.
Do women go into a decline these days from corroding love and hope
in ruins? If so, one never hears of it and the disease is
unfashionable in modern fiction. But in that era woman was woman and
little besides. If a woman of the fashionable world she had Society
besides her family and housekeeping. She rarely travelled, certainly
not from California, and if one of her band fell upon evil days and
was forced to teach school, knit baby sacques, or keep a boarding-house,
she was pitied but by no means emulated. Madeleine had neither
house nor children, and more money than she could spend. She had
nothing to ask of life but happiness and that was for ever denied
her. Masters had never been out of her mind for a moment during her
waking hours, and she had slept little.
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