ABSTRACT
The winter wore on, and Bridget remained with the Mansfields. Every attempt on her side to urge that she ought to take rooms was met by determined opposition on the part of her friends. Finally it was settled that she should stay at any rate till after Helen’s marriage, which was arranged for the middle of May. Helen never forgot the evenings of that winter, when the curtains were drawn, and the shaded lamps and the firelight, made their little drawing-room glow like a warmly tinted jewel. Nearly every night, two or three people came in after dinner, in informal fashion. Her father would sit in his huge arm-chair on one side of the fire, talking with the eagerness of a boy, of the last new poem, or the extraordinary promise of this, or that young painter. Bridget, sometimes in a fantastic, sometimes in a whimsical, less often in a serious mood, moved about the room, talking and laughing in her eager, vivid fashion. She was a girl again then, Helen said to herself with a thrill of pleasure; the Bridget of three years ago -quick, impulsive, with as many moods as there were hours in the day, sometimes in the highest heaven of delight, sometimes the uttermost depths of dejection. She never spoke of her husband. By tacit consent, his name was rarely mentioned between them. ‘I want to tear out that chapter and burn it,’ she said once. ‘It will have to be destroyed in a slow fire; but in the end it will perish utterly.’
