In the established order of things as she knew them she saw no place for
her individual adventure....
She sat in her chair without undressing till faint grey streaks began
to divide the black slats of the shutters. Then she stood up and pushed
them open, letting in the light. The coming of a new day brought a
sharper consciousness of ineluctable reality, and with it a sense of the
need of action. She looked at herself in the glass, and saw her face,
white in the autumn dawn, with pinched cheeks and dark-ringed eyes, and
all the marks of her state that she herself would never have noticed,
but that Dr. Merkle's diagnosis had made plain to her. She could not
hope that those signs would escape the watchful village; even before her
figure lost its shape she knew her face would betray her.
Leaning from her window she looked out on the dark and empty scene; the
ashen houses with shuttered windows, the grey road climbing the slope to
the hemlock belt above the cemetery, and the heavy mass of the Mountain
black against a rainy sky.
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