She was very tender, very thoughtful, insistently cheerful, as though
determined that her own ill-fortune should not affect the rest of the
household.
But to Lily this peace was not an interlude, but an end. Life for
her was over. Her bright dreams were gone, her future settled.
Without so putting it, even to herself, she dedicated herself to
service, to small kindnesses, and little thoughtful acts. She was,
daily and hourly, making reparation to them all for what she had
cost them, in hope.
That was the thing that had gone out of life. Hope. Her loathing
of Louis Akers was gone. She did not hate him. Rather she felt
toward him a sort of numbed indifference. She wished never to see
him again, but the revolt that had followed her knowledge of the
conditions under which he had married her was gone. She tried to
understand his viewpoint, to make allowances for his lack of some
fundamental creed to live by. But as the days went on, with that
healthy tendency of the mind to bury pain, she found him, from a
figure that bulked so large as to shut out all the horizon of her
life, receding more and more.
But always he would shut off certain things.
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