"After all, I knew him. He was older, no
doubt, than you, but he was kind. I think, too, he cared for you."
"Yes. He was kindness itself, and he cared for me. Both things are true.
The knowledge that he did care for me was the one link, if you
understand. At the beginning I was contented, I suppose. I had a house
in town and another here. But it was dull," and she stretched out her
arms. "Oh, how dull it was! Do you know the little back streets in a
manufacturing town? Rows of small houses, side by side, with nothing to
relieve them of their ugly regularity, each with the self-same windows,
the self-same door, the self-same door-step. Overhead a drift of smoke,
and every little green thing down to the plants in the window dirty and
black. The sort of street whence any crazy religious charlatan who can
promise a little colour to their grey lives can get as many votaries as
he wants. Well, when I thought over my life, one of those little streets
always came into my mind. There are women, heaps of them, no doubt, to
whom the management of a big house, the season in London, the ordinary
round of visits, are sufficient. I, worse luck, was not one of them.
Dull! You, with your hundred thousand things to do, cannot conceive how
oppressively dull my life was.
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