We had no one in the house with us. Alice did everything; and though I made a pretence of helping her, I did her little service. Sometimes I put my own bedchamber in order, with a childish satisfaction, but no small degree of fatigue; and with so small a house, and so little trouble necessary, there was not much to do. I could not bear Alice to be out of my presence; we ate together, sat together, walked together; I was quite dependent upon her; altogether a great change had come upon me. I never had been what people call intellectual, but now in the day of my weakness how I clung to the womanly occupations, the womanly society, aye, to such a poor thing as gossip, which was only redeemed from being the very vulgarest of amusements, because it was gossip of the past. When I sat at my sewing, with Alice talking to me; when I listened to tales of this one and the other one, whom she had known in her youth,--everything about them; their dress, their habits, their marriages, their children, their misfortunes; when I cut, and sewed, and contrived these pretty things I still was making, sometimes I was almost happy. Yes, if it was in reality a descent from more elevated and elevating occupations, I still must confess to it, a woman after all is but a woman, and there are times when the greatest book, or the grandest imaginations in the world, have no attractions compared with those of a piece of muslin, a needle and a thread. I felt it so, at least. I remember the little parlor gratefully, with its round table and overflowing work-basket, the beautiful river and the passing boats without, and Alice recalling the experiences of her youth within. For all this time my only safeguard lay in trying to forget, or to turn my back upon the great question of my life. I no longer brooded over the injury my husband had done me; it seemed to have floated away from my sight, and become an imagination, a vision, a dream. I could not even recall our life at Cottiswoode; when I attempted to return to it a veil fell upon my eyes, and a dull remorse at my heart made the very attempt at recollection intolerable to me. Instead of that, the bright days before our marriage, the bright days after it, continually, and even against my will, came to my mind. I went over and over again the course of our happy journey; I recalled all our hopes, all our conversations, all our plans for the future; and this was all over, all gone, vanished like a tale that is told! It is not wonderful that I should try with all my might to keep myself from thinking. It was dreadful to fall into such a reverie as this, and then to awaken from it, and recollect how everything really was.