To-night,
under the spell of some vague expectancy, she had sat still for a long
time, her sewing laid aside and her room scrupulously in order. She was
waiting for what was not to be acknowledged even to her own intimate
self. But as the clock struck nine, she roused herself, and shook off
her mood in impatience and a disappointment which she would not own.
She looked about the room, as she often had of late, and began to
enumerate its possibilities in case she should desire to have it
changed. Amelia never went so far as to say that change should be; she
only felt that she had still a right to speculate upon it, as she had
done for many years, as a form of harmless enjoyment. While every other
house in the neighborhood had gone from the consistently good to the
prosperously bad in the matter of refurnishing, John Porter had kept
his precisely as his grandfather had left it to him. Amelia had never
once complained; she had observed toward her husband an unfailing
deference, due, she felt, to his twenty years' seniority; perhaps,
also, it stood in her own mind as the only amends she could offer him
for having married him without love. It was her father who made the
match; and Amelia had succumbed, not through the obedience claimed by
parents of an elder day, but from hot jealousy and the pique inevitably
born of it.
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