It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilisation, the sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon strings, what a long series of gradations! In the enlightened child of civilisation the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and eyes half blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward, a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears subside a little, and with her head leaning backward at the angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state. Mrs Pullet brushed each door-post with great nicety, about the latitude of her shoulders (at that period a woman was truly ridiculous to an instructed eye if she did not measure a yard and a half across the shoulders), and having done that sent the muscles of her face in quest of fresh tears as she advanced into the parlour where Mrs Glegg was seated. “Well, sister, you’re late; what’s the matter?” said Mrs Glegg, rather sharply, as they shook hands. Mrs Pullet sat down, lifting up her mantle carefully behind, before she answered,— “She’s gone,” unconsciously using an impressive figure of rhetoric. “It isn’t the glass this time, then,” thought Mrs Tulliver. “Died the day before yesterday,” continued Mrs Pullet; “an’ her legs was as thick as my body,” she added, with deep sadness, after a pause. “They’d tapped her no end o’ times, and the water—they say you might ha’ swum in it, if you’d liked.” “Well, Sophy, it’s a mercy she’s gone, then, whoever she may be,” said Mrs Glegg, with the promptitude and emphasis of a mind naturally clear and decided; “but I can’t think who you’re talking of, for my part.” “But _I_ know,” said Mrs Pullet, sighing and shaking her head; “and there isn’t another such a dropsy in the parish. _I_ know as it’s old Mrs Sutton o’ the Twentylands.”